


The Ruined Peoples

by Pascal_in_Quebec



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Contracts oaths & bonds, Dimensions & planes, Empire Building, Fae & Fairies, Fully developed magical system, ICW, Magical ruins, Other, Pureblood Society (Harry Potter), The Light of Wizarding Britain, The White Council, The greater good, Wizarding Culture (Harry Potter), magical world building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:35:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 254,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23241850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pascal_in_Quebec/pseuds/Pascal_in_Quebec
Summary: Harry was imprisoned at the Dursley's since his parents' deaths but with very distant and lax supervision. Harry gets help to free himself from the bindings starting in primary school and then attends Hogwarts for first year as he had no choice, lest the Ministry force him or puts him in Azkaban. However, after the first year in Hogwarts, the house-elf Dobby will help Harry to escape for good and start planning how to destroy the culture that allowed Dumbledore to rule so mightily so long.
Comments: 26
Kudos: 26





	1. What happened and why

The author wishes to express thanks to anyone who may read this story and encourages them to leave reviews, comments or even flame it hard. As with any who try their hand at publicly expressing an idea or story concept, all feedback is important and welcome.  
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, the Torchlight games, nor any other sci-fi or fantasy series, movies, comics, cartoons or news items used in this fiction as they belong to the creators, broadcasters or publishers who put them out for consumption by the public.

Author's notes about the story and development

The story is rated "M" not for smut or porn despite the sex scenes that may happen at some point but because of life events that happen in spite of our best intentions. Kids swear, smoke, drink alcohol and take drugs because the adults around them are like that. Violence permeates families, schools, churches and the streets we walk. Police brutality and corruption is rife and cheap to buy. Politicians have no care beyond the next election or big contribution to their hidden retirement stash. The Earth is raped, maimed and murdered every day but nobody cares unless they are paid to care or a person they love becomes sick and dies. Medicine saves us but do we want to see and feel the blood and guts being worked into, or share the pain and humiliation of the person getting cut up like cattle on the butcher's block?

The story is rated "M" because life is not for the faint of heart. Survival takes guts and passion and rage and a dose of killer instinct. Unlike the empty promises of religion, I can guarantee that the meek, the weak and the poor will not inherit the Earth at the End Times; they will all be dead or enslaved in the armies that fight for control over the scraps, but they will not inherit anything.

The story will be a multi-crossover with mainly with the video game Torchlight I & II while adding a Cthulhu Mythos and steampunk slant to the context of the tale. Some TV series, movies, cartoons & comics will be referred as part of the background mundane culture of the epoch, but not actual crossovers. Historical British persons will be referred, as will governmental functions and military positions. Some rewriting of mundane history will happen, but not that mush as it isn't the focus of the tale. The magical system used is a merge of HP canon, HP fanon, Advanced AD&D, RoleMaster/SpaceMaster, Torchlight spells, powers & Ember crafting, alchemy & transmutation from FullMetal Alchemist, shinobi from Naruto, magicks from Dresden Files, most of the Cthulhu Mythos beasts & magicks and Steampunk tech. Many of the deities or celestials mentioned are from the "Forgotten Realms" book series, as well as all the previously mentioned sources. Everything is mixed and proportioned to their species, race, culture and job specialization so it all gels together pretty correctly without having anybody overly powerful unless they are in fact Exalted, Celestial or Godly.

Full summary of story

Poor little Harry's early life was worse than Dumbledore could have imagined, or would ever have admitted, even if he saw it with his own eyes. The "Greater Good of Wizarding Britain" had established that the sacrifice of the Potter bloodline must be made, and so it would be, so that the rest of the population could avoid a return of the Dreaded Lord of the Darkes, Voldemort.

This deplorable state of affairs meant that when Harry Potter arrived at Hogwarts, he already had life experiences and survival skills that were more fit for the street gangs than polite society, and he was far from being a pliable pawn, no matter how meek, weak and docile he acted. For you see, Harry had learned young to hide his mind, aptitudes and temper for fear of being beaten by his relatives or teachers. Hogwarts soon proved to be no different than his life to date, and the events of First Year showed the child that he had no real future if he stayed.

Then arrived that fateful night, whence the mistreated house-elf Dobby came to warn him of dire perils coming to Hogwarts, aimed right at his life. Harry chose a far different path than the abnegation and self-sacrifice Dumbledore thought him groomed for. The discussion with Dobby took several days, and results in a far different situation than anybody wizardly or muggle could have ever thought. Dobby takes Harry to a sector of the English Isles that was forgotten by Time and Society, a grouping of abandoned ruins that have stood empty for centuries. From this almost blank canvas, young Harry will build an alliance that will shake the foundations of Britain to remake the wizarding world back into an open, pluralistic magical society that it had been in far Antiquity.

THE RUINED PEOPLES

First chapter: What happened and why

The Manipulator's hidden hands

(Harry Potter - theme)

1981  
Moving around  
The British Isles & Realms

When the events of 1981 occurred in Godric's Hollow, turning poor baby Harry into an orphan, many underhanded plots and schemes were enacted to insure the infant would have no choices in life other than to follow the path laid before him. By the will of a cowardly manipulator who dwelt in shadows, the boy would be astrained to plod along the tracks set in place by the secret conductor, like a locomotive bound to its railway, without any hope of ever leaving them for better roads.

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore was born in the late 1800's, and was very much a product of the culture and mores of the era, including that despite being a scholar and erudite of strong mind, he was also quite superstitious. Like most well learned men of his day, he believed strongly in spiritism, seances, augury, oracular testimony and prophetic visions granted by the Old Gods and Providence. As such, the elderly magus had no mental problems or moral qualms about being a highly trained alchemist who valued pure science while following naturopathic and totemistic philosophies. When you live in a world where ghosts fly around your dinner table at all hours of the day, it is hard to keep a stable, rational mind over the long term. But Dumbledore was not alone in this deviance; thousands in the wizarding world develop similar mental quirks and logic faults without realizing the slippery down-slope they are sliding on. You never think you are evil, if the entire population around does the same thing, and you certainly can't be wrong if they adulate you and promote you to all the positions of power they have to offer.

Just ask the German people, after 1945, what they have learned about those societal and psychological mechanisms; it will be enlightening as much as frightening.

Suffice it to say that Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, Chief Warlock of the British Wizengamot, and Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Warlocks, had all the proofs in hand that he was more intelligent, more educated in the arcane, and more morally pure and exalted, than any others because the entire British population said so. Therefore, why would he ever have reason to doubt his own superbly blessed judgment of Things To Come?

HE had heard the prophecy, as it was told to him and none other.

HE had seen the pieces on the board, and moved them to fruition, not anybody else.

HE had the moral authority to influence James Potter and Frank Longbottom into going under Fidelius, with secret keepers of his choosing. Like worshipers in a church, the families obeyed the diktats of their priest as they thought he was 'inspired from above'.

HE had timed the betrayals of both boys involved in the prophecy so as to control events for their placement, education and personal development from afar, without anybody seeing it happen.

HE had manipulated the mental instability of Sirius Black to send him after the true traitor, then warned the aurors about his 'suspicions' concerning the future Lord Black's morality, lawfulness and stability. So warned, the aurors didn't waste time with questions or investigation when they arrived at the sight of the explosion that killed 12 muggles. Sirius Orion Black III was chucked in Azkaban prison without a trial, an audit or even a family visit, as Albus planned. With Harry Potter's primary oath-bound godfather out of the way, the plans for the Child of Prophecy could proceed apace.

All the blood relatives of the Black lineage were set aside quickly, by custom, family law, or false decrees passed surreptitiously in the Wizengamot by bribed, intimidated, potioned or spelled members who voted what Dumbledore put in their minds with legilimancy. A few who would have objected beyond his capacity to bribe or spell were attacked by imperiused muggles dressed as low-rank Death Eaters during the fallout of the war, so nobody ever linked these deaths to his hands. Said muggle pawns were then obliviated, confounded and killed with their corpses incinerated and vanished. Albus was an old warhorse who'd seen the trenches of World War I and II, he knew how to run counter-intelligence operations competently, especially since he absolutely FEARED any sorts of direct combat against strong opponents.

The Longbottom Lord and Lady were tortured into a coma, and Dumbledore made regular visits to Saint-Mungo's hospital to insure they were fed an alchemical concoction he brewed, thusly keeping them in their enforced reduced mental faculties. Augusta (née Rosier) didn't like him one whit, but she was distraught enough to not perceive the small doses of weak loyalty potion he put in her tea when he visited her at home, the hospital or the Gamot offices. Likewise, those healers he kept under imperius and loyalty potions were barred from harming anyone, just report all comings & goings of importance, and keep and few patients in their states of illness and mental incapacity so they no longer troubled Britannia.

The solicitors for the Potter family were attacked and burned out of business by the true Death Eaters, on fake orders that Albus had them receive through Severus Snape, as if Voldemort himself had given them. Since the Dark Lord was well happy with the resulting fear and chaos, nobody ever looked further. This later allowed Dumbledore to illegally, and falsely, seal the Potter wills & testaments to have himself declared legal guardian for the Potter Heir. He could not reach the copies of the documents stored inside Gringotts goblin bank, but he tried to pass unlawful national security decrees through a potioned & spelled Gamot meeting to force the Goblins to not reveal the wills to anybody who wasn't a Potter by blood. The person asking for the paperwork had to be present in person and submit to a mandatory Heritage Blood-Tithe Ritual. This intrusion into the inner working so the bank almost started yet another Goblin Revolt, which needed multiple concessions from the human wizards towards the sovereign nation to appease them back into their usual harmless grumbling.

In his attempt to outwit far better and craftier people than himself, Dumbledore had essentially rung the death knell of his manipulations and treasons as the Goblins never forgot anything done to them, regardless of payments and bribes the Gamot may have paid. They knew who was guilty, and suspected why he acted this way therefore the vaults and accounts of -BOTH- Potter and Longbottom houses were shuttered under an emergency decree by Ragnok Backsnapper, head of clan Gutspiked, 471st king of the British Goblins. This meant that only those payments necessary for the upkeep of properties, businesses and contractual debts would be processed, while revenues would be received and tabulate as normal. Each heir already had a trust vault as was the custom, so their own schooling and health fees were secure, as well as the allowance that each family had stipulated in the vault service contract. Likewise, Ragnok shuttered the Black house vaults and accounts when it was proven that the Wizengamot had put the future Lord in prison without lawful arrest, investigation or any form of audit or trial to justify the gesture. The Gringotts bank tried to publish the event in the Daily Prophet but was rebuffed by the editor, so they went to international periodicals, most notably the Washington DC Magical Herald, the Paris Libre et Magique pour Toujours, the Berliner Haexenzeitung, the Muskovita Gazeta, and the Tokyo Nippou Mahō no shinbun.

The governmental and popular backlash against the British Gamot and Dumbledore was so bad that Albus was at risk of losing his posting as Supreme Mugwump in the ICW and his diplomatic rights as British Member for the ICW general assembly if things proceeded along the path he had plotted. With his back to the wall and thousands of wands aimed at his face, the Manipulator had no choice but to improvise, so his potioned minions put Sirius Black in front of a cockamamie Secret Unspeakable Court and found him guilty of, you guessed it, 'Unspeakable & Anathema' crimes that couldn't be reported in public for fear of triggering a panic amongst the sensible, innocent souls of Britannia. The man was hence-with condemned to life-long banishment from the UK, British Isles and Realms until some future Wizengamot chose to give him a public trial to see if he had 'repented' his sins against magyck. Showing a rare moment of awareness of his limits in life and society, Albus didn't try to have the Black vaults and accounts seized or shuttered by ministerial decree, as he had thought of doing. Especially since Black immediately petitioned the ICW general assembly for a public trial on their stage, with Gringotts backing the request. This happened despite all that Albus tried, and Sirius Orion Black III was cleared of all charges levied against him by the British, upon which he assumed his Lordship and headship of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, peer of the Britannic Realms, regent Duke of the Zezetshire Cairnhills in the English Midlands.

Upon his elevation, Sirius wanted to petition the queen for recognition of his innocence to have his citizenship back, but Dumbledore used his usual curses, potions, and a bevvy of chicaneries between the Wizengamot and muggle parliament to stall any process for years to come. He could not stall eternally, but as long as it all blew up after Harry and Voldemort killed each other, then the crowds wouldn't give a damn what he had done to keep them safely out of the fight. Sirius could waste his time, life and the Black assets on getting a trial in England, Albus wished him the best of lucks because the boy didn't have the intellect, astuteness, acumen and magical prowess to counter a mastermind of the caliber he had chosen as enemy. Well, Dumbledore was wrong yet again, but only time would tell, and there were no guarantees he'd listen when it happened.

Now, in order to insure the two boys of prophecy were raised to be docile, pliable and low-powered, Albus hijacked as much of the few riches and valuables present in the Potter's Godric's Hollow cottage, on the night it exploded. Because of those bastard sub-human Goblins, he was lowered to the level of sifting through catastrophe zones for forgotten loot, just like a pauper teenager fresh out of school. He used these ill-gained monies, tools and artworks to bribe the workers in the ministry department that managed the Trace charms placed on children and convicts that were sentenced to penal labor in the community or probation periods. He had the workers place multiple ward crystals in a containment circle around the houses of the two boys to make sure he would have a complete record of their accidental magic and any wand spells cast in the area. This was especially vital with Longbottom Manor as any medical or alchemical spells could mean that Augusta was trying to free herself from his loyalty potions and compulsion curses. Later on, it would let him see what kinds of spells the two boys were trying out in the privacy of their homes, and intervene to crush them back down if needed.

Albus Dumbledore did not believe himself to be an evil man, no matter how many deaths or broken souls he left in his wake. In his messianic syndrome, he thought himself to be just an 'Agent of Providence' doing as the Divines had tasked him to accomplish so that the rest of society could eventually live without the threat of Voldemort hovering over their heads. Consequently, he NEVER told either family to belittle, harm or damage the child in their care. His only explicit orders were to be firm in their strictness so that the children grew up humble, level-headed, stable, and hard working, not letting them wound up savage, snobby, bigoted, or air-headed. He never once told them to be violent or injurious, and certainly not to withhold medical care from their charges. If either guardian did this to a child, it was on their own conscience, not Dumbledore's.

What a bloody fucking hypocrite!

Once each child was in position, Albus pretty much ignored them unless a truly spectacular act of accidental magic was recorded or a message came from the secret watchers he had placed near the homes, just to make sure. Unfortunately, both sets of paid eyes sent multiple messages concerning emotional abuse, physical coercion and even beatings the kids suffered from their caregivers or other adults. Dumbledore always dismissed these letters as the watchers being too softhearted or not experienced enough in education to see it was normal parenting.

What's the point of having 'eyes' if you're too blind to see anything?

What's the point of having 'ears' all over the country if he never listened to their reports?

Because he was DUMBLEDORE and he was always right, due to his superior intellect, education, erudition, greater magic and multiple societal jobs. He had convinced himself in the back of his mind to believe that the external watchers he set were to -confirm- what he knew as truth, not tell him reality was different. That subconscious mindset would come back to bite him quite badly, and very quickly.

Infant Harry Potter

(Harry Potter - theme)

1981 - 1986  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

Harry's first 15 months of life were ordinary for a Pureblood Heir. He was raised mostly by his mother who was studying from home to finish her charms and potions masteries in prevision of becoming a children's healer for Saint-Mungo's hospital. Lilian Mary Evans Potter, spoken Lily by her friends, was assisted by her in-laws and by an elderly house-elf that had helped raise James until he entered school. The boy's father was present in his life every day as he was studying to participate in the family's vast business holdings. He was assiduously following the tutorship of his father and grand-father in the arts of Family Magicks, which he would then pass-on to his children when they reached their own majority, at age 17, as was the Potter tradition.

James and Lily had married right out of Hogwarts at age 18, mostly because the Blood Purity War was already picking up steam and there were no guarantees for anybody's survival anymore. Lily was already depressive because her parents died in a traffic accident when she had just turned 17 years old, in her last year of school. She had missed their funerals because the muggles hadn't remembered how to contact them because of the war-time wards around those sectors under Wizengamot control. Immediately thereafter that deplorable incident, her sister renounced her and refused to attend their wedding, nor invited them to hers.

Then catastrophes happened one after the other for House Potter.

Harry's great-grand parents, Fleamont Potter and Euphemia Bones, were murdered in Diagon Alley on their usual Sunday shopping, which they did after attending the Lunar Temple to worship the Old Gods and Forest Dwellers with their friends and relatives. Barely twenty hours after their deaths, Voldemort himself attacked the venerable Potter Manor, trying to raze it to the ground. Despite the nominal master's death, the wards, animated golems, human hirelings and house-elves managed to fend-off the monstrous creature, pushing his troops back with heavy losses and multiple handicapping injuries to all involved. In a short pause during the tail-end of the conflict, the house-elves activated an old sacrificial War Ward that the British Ministry had made illegal several decades earlier, by giving the life of three captured Death Eaters to the manor's Keystone. The entire Potter Manor -shunted- its entire ensemble of buildings and territory to a hidden location that was under a religious Fidelius and Primal Essaence based Siege Wards.

Taken by a tsunami of boiling rage at his public defeat, Voldemort turned around, immediately attacking Jame's parents in their well appointed urban manor in Wales. Again, the Dread Lord suffered many losses to his followers, but this time he managed to penetrate the wards of the relatively new building, barely 178 years old, to kill both Charlus Potter and Dorea Black with all their elves, then set Fiendfire to the wrecked house after plundering all valuables that the auto-vaulting recovery spells hadn't removed to Gringotts for safe keeping.

With both primary residences of the family locked away or destroyed, James and Lily had no choice but to take refuge in the family's 'bachelor flat', the cottage of Godric's Hollow. The large two-level house had historically been the lodgings for the Potter children after their Hogwarts years, if they didn't want to live glued to their parents' sides, but still have contact with the family. The homey dwelling could easily accommodate a family of eight plus two human servants and two house-elves without being overcrowded. That was not by any stretch of the imagination a dump or blue-collar homestead, unlike where Lily had grown up, in Cokeworth.

Given that the Potter Cottage was not a well known place, Dumbledore easily convinced James to put it under a Sorcerous Fidelius that he would cast for the young family, supposedly to guarantee the stability and longevity of the enchantment. Unknown to them, that spell would have kept both Voldemort and the Manipulator out if they had cast it themselves, then chosen any secret keeper other than the traitorous Peter Pettigrew. Unfortunately, the young couple trusted Albus already, thusly the scheduled betrayal was accomplished forthwith.

After the events of Voldemort's Fall, Harry's life took an immediate turn for the worse.

Dumbledore had Rubeus Hagrid retrieve the baby and bring him to Hogwarts so that Madam Pomphrey could give him a checkup, before placing him with his new guardians, Lily's estranged sister Petunia and her husband Vernon. The matron did her best by the child in her care, but being potioned and spelled by Dumbledore for obedience, blind loyalty and discretion towards his much vaunted 'Greater Good' meant she actually did less than half of what was needed to heal the child's numerous injuries, to say nothing of the curse residues.

Thusly, young Harold Jamieson Evans Potter, Heir of Potter and Heir Presumptive of Black, was deposited on the doorstep like a milk bottle, in the depth of night, without ringing the doorbell or giving the inhabitants any sort of warning. What Dumbledore did leave was a heavily ensorcelled letter that would push the Dursley's to treat poor Harry as a difficult, dishonest child that needed 'maintenance' corrections and unyielding discipline to keep him from becoming wild and unmanageable. Here, Dumbledore could probably try to lie his way out of being declared an abuser and sadistic bastard, but he really couldn't. He set the mental programming in the curses to make the entire household, including occasional visitors, treat little Harry as if he were a hardened delinquent being held in a Borstal Reformatory from the years 1800. That meant that what Dumbledore considered "mild maintenance punishment to keep him docile" and could be excused away in the wizarding world because of potions and healing charms being so easy to find and use, became outright cruelty and torture with muggle guardians who had no access to those remedies to heal the injuries they inflicted on the child.

As usual, Albus had played on words and intentions; having one thing in mind, saying another and hoping that the people he addressed understood something else, then went away to commit acts that were yet another thing entirely. Having the habit of calculating 4 degrees of separation between his lips/writings and what happened in the real world made Albus Dumbledore the sort of enemy that nightmares were made of, especially given how amoral and narcissist he was. But, as was now usual for him after a century of practice, his written, cursed words were put into action in a manner so different from his orders that he had several legal & moral defenses built into the situation by the gestures and intents of others.

Little infant Harry would suffer greatly, in the Dursley household.

From the start he was refused the proper amount and quality of food since Vernon thought that a starving child would be less energetic, less prone to fits and tantrums, unlike his boy Dudley who was actually overfed and becoming pudgy by the day. Because Petunia had a limited amount of patience for anything related to domestic chores or active child rearing, Harry often went without changing his diaper in a timely schedule, was rarely washed as it would mean taking care of said diaper too, and neither adult wanted to hold him, since they disliked him already. In point of fact, Petunia tried repeatedly in the first 12 months to drop the child at diverse churches or group homes to rid her household of his pestilent presence. Nothing could separate the baby from his unwilling keepers, as Dumbledore had foreseen the situation, solving it in the laziest way possible by tasking a Hogwarts elf to discretely watch and report directly, without ever telling anybody else, including castle staffers. After the first two months of such aggressive attempts to rid themselves of the boy, including abandoning him in a subway station, a bus terminal, in a public library just before closing time, and in a truck-stop restroom at midnight, Dumbledore change tactics. He wrote down a list of situations in a "If – Then – What" style for the elf to follow without bothering him about it, unless the problem was not in the existent list.

The invisible, silent, house-elf would be present for the first five years then, when Harry passed his 6th birthday, becoming eligible for compulsory public primary school, Dumbledore pulled him back to regular duties in the castle. The little child was left to his own devices, and the headmaster never looked at the written reports the elf had compiled about the grievous violence and abuses the Dursley's had heaped on the poor lad. As far as Albus was concerned, he only needed the boy alive, moderately healthy, with low skills and sociability, and almost no survival aptitudes or self-esteem to speak of. Anything else could be gleefully ignored until it was time to eulogize the martyred boy, after Voldemort was buried for the rest of Albus' lifetime.

But things didn't happen the way the self-absorbed elderly Manipulator wanted.

The cursed letter and bastardized prison ward scheme he had applied to the house interacted with the innate dislike and distaste the Dursley's naturally felt for their charge. This meant that they put efforts into correction & discipline only if he was in arm's length, or they received a complaint from an adult they regarded as important in society. Being clannish and parochial by nature, the two parents were prone to ignoring anything bad spoken about Dudley, and reacted the same for Harry when it was a pure stranger who tried to say or do anything. This meant that Harry, who was not a genius but intelligent and observant all the same, quickly divined the behavior patterns and saw a way out by the time the poor traumatized house-elf was pulled away from his silent service.

Harry's bad turn that turned good

(Harry Potter - theme)

August 1986  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

From the age of 6 and up, once he started going to elementary school, Harry did the strictest minimum of anything ordered from him in the household. He usually disappeared in the streets from after Vernon left for work, staying away right until evening tea. Whenever the calendar predicted a long weekend, a family or religious holiday, or Vernon's fat sow of a sister visited, the infant found ways to stay completely away from the house for several days at a time. In fact, by age 7 it became normal for him to get out before Petunia cooked breakfast for her family, and come back only just before they closed the house for the night, near ten-thirty. If by any chance he got locked out because they turned in early, he had found a truly safe area in the neighborhood that he could use for shelter, even in the harshest of snowy winter nights.

Not far from Little Whining where he lived was an old concrete tunnel that passed under a railway that served the local branch of the suburban trains that linked with London City. The tunnel dated back to the reconstruction period after World War II and was in bad repair, but it had something nice that saved Harry from weather, gangs and pedophiles on countless occasions. The tunnel had been built with an integrated workman's shelter that had a heavy steel-plate door, cast iron wood stove, 12 steel-framed bunk beds, and three wet stalls containing each a sink, toilet and shower-head. The door had no built-in lock but it did have eye-screws on the outside to set in a padlock and a pair of stout deadbolts inside. Harry only had to filch some of Vernon's loose change while cleaning the couch, sofas and laundry to buy a good padlock with four sets of keys included. That would allow him to have keys hidden with his emergency stashes, just in case he got mugged or searched by a policeman.

After that, he picked dead wood from the public park the tunnel gave access to for the stove, and promptly stole wooden matches, candles, lighter fluid from the Dursley's, and scrounged old newspapers or magazines from the waste bins in the neighborhood as tinder. With the basic necessities in place, Harry only needed to grease and heat the old valves to unstuck them so that running water would flow again. As he had been drafted by Vernon to do just such a job in their garden shed after the last winter, the child knew how and had little trouble to accomplish the job. He was helped by having stolen a few of the older, less used tools in both the shed in question and the garage where nobody but Vernon and himself went to do stuff.

One day both adults took Dudley to see a pediatrician for vaccines and a regularly scheduled checkup, followed by a friendly visit at the home of a business partner of Vernon's afterwards. During that rare time alone in the house, Harry managed to find the keys for the attic and basement to let himself into the usually forbidden places.

The attic held only old stuff Petunia wanted out of the way, and especially out of sight, since all of her mementos from her childhood and sister Lily were stored there, untouched for longer than Harry was alive. The child found a huge old steamer trunk with a weird lock and colored heraldic crest on the flat top, but could not open it yet as he had no key. He did manage to find a very old photo album that was not secured, containing pictures of his mother when she was a child, something he shamelessly stole and brought to his concrete bunker later in the evening.

The basement was an altogether different story. That was normally Vernon's reserved domain, because he had set up his home office to keep all of the Grunning's paperwork in order in large filing cabinets. He had been loaned a heavy manual typewriter by the company to speed-up the composition and producing of his weekly reports since he had been promoted to department manager just two years before, when Harry was age 4. The basement was split into multiple sectors of high interest for the young explorer. Almost useless were the publicly accessible second living room with its small, menial wood-burning brick fireplace and matching diminutive windows, with the small powder room next to the staircase. Much more fruitful were the actual office portion, the machine room with gas furnace, water heater, main electrical box and several shelves of loose tools, parts and sundries, and a tightly shut cold room for long-term emergency reserves.

Harry took the time to scrutinize each square inch of Vernon's office to see if he could safely nick anything without it being traced back to him. He found a deep drawer in the file cabinet nearest the desk that held all the worn, no-longer needed office supplies and knickknacks that Vernon had been too lazy to throw away properly. He found several spare pencils of diverse colors to draw with, a few very old pens that still worked, an antique metal dipping pen that Vernon had used during his engineering classes to manually draw mechanical parts, a brand new box of colored chalk sticks, some worn-down erasers stubs, plenty of lined or checkered paper pads and rulers. All good for Harry to write lists, schedules, or draw what he wanted to fix in his bunker. Plus, he liked to draw plants and animals, so that would pass the time nicely; it wasn't like he could have a telly in that cement crypt! There was no electricity in the shelter because it was too old; the public works of the day had used diesel trains, not electric, and all their stations or shelters had oil lamps and wood stoves. Even using gas for the lamps and furnaces was deemed too expensive for such low-browed usages in blue-collar environments.

In-between the huge, plush, desk chair's segmented cushions, Harry found a wealth of loose small change that had accumulated for years on end, almost 18 pounds' worth of it! That gave him the idea to check all the drawers to see if Vernon didn't have a hidden stash of coins or bills that he could slightly lighten, just to round off his capacity to buy necessities at the antiquated Pawn Shop in the next district, some 9 streets passed the public park where he hid and lived. He was rewarded by the discovery of not one but four small jars of coins hidden in diverse drawers and spread between different pieces of furniture. He stole only a few coins from each, normally less than 5 pounds Sterling to make certain his pickings weren't easily seen to the naked eye. Given the layer of dust on some, he believed that Vernon was just as lazy with his money pinching as he was with everything else in life.

With the office searched, Harry went through the machinery room, a glorified walk-in closet with little moving room due to the large devices occupying most of the space. What attracted his attention was the quantity of old but still good tools, most of which were small enough to fit easily in his childish hands. A few minutes of silent inspection explained to him why that was the case; most of the control valves and electrical connections on the machines were small and located in uneasy spots where full-sized tools would be hard-pressed to reach and move. The solution was to use the long-handled but smaller versions of those tools needed, such as screwdriver, wrench, hammer, pliers and crowbar.

Harry was happy as the layer of oil residue covering the tools meant that nobody had moved them in several years, and the same on the floor confirmed the absence of human presence in the room at all. That gave him the impetus to take what he felt useful for his shelter, because he knew full well that anything he took here was something he would not have to buy, find or steal from somewhere else. Since money was in short supply despite his windfall of nearly 38 pounds today, he was wise enough to see the menial amount would not last, so he'd better be smart about saving and spending sparingly from the start of things.

The key for the padlock to the cold storage room was hidden quite badly in the machinery room, on the shelf right next to the door on the way in. Apparently, Petunia was afraid to lose the thing and Vernon was not the one in charge of stocking and maintaining the storage, so that was how things went. Shrugging it off carelessly, the young child unlocked the heavy door and blocked it open by sliding down the safety dead-bolt that was designed for just that; preventing the accidental closing and locking of the door with a person inside the room. Harry perused the thin metal trellis shelving with a critical eye towards finding edibles that were small enough to pass under his watchers' eyes without trouble, but good enough that he'd want to make the effort to bring them to his hidey-hole.

However, his problems were suddenly solved with a partial heart attack when the phone rang thrice before the voice of his uncle sounded through the speaker of the cassette tape answering machines, both in the office and upstairs. They were delayed by traffic on the highway due to a massive accident with over two dozen vehicles piled-up, and his own car had gotten skirted rather badly on the passenger side before they ended in the ditch with nearly six other cars. Because of the stress shock incurred by the relatives, plus the slowness of the police investigation into the causes of the catastrophe, they would be stuck on the spot for several hours. This would force the three Dursley's to sleep in a cheap motel for the night and return home in the early after-noon tomorrow, just after lunch and a bit of shopping. Unless they had to stop by the garage to fix the car to have it road-safe per the police instructions, in which case they could be delayed even further. They would call to warn him.

Then his uncle actually thanked the empty air, stating tartly; "I know you're in the house and listening, but I have to say that I appreciate you not picking up to force your damned flutey voice on me, given all the stress I already have to endure. Maybe you do have a few brain cells to rub together after all, and maybe smacking you around won't be needed, now that you're showing some discernment in how you interact with adults. Hummmph! We'll see when we come back how it goes." Beep!

Harry was so stunned by the vitriolic, blind demeanment he had just suffered that he stood there paralyzed by emotions for several minutes before the importance of what the older man said finally penetrated the fog around his mind. He had almost an entire day to himself to finish his pilfering and go stash it in his new home! Yay for him! It was about damn time that luck changed for Harry the Bloody Freak Potter!

Enthused by his new schedule, the child climbed back up the stairs to fetch a pair of rucksacks from Dudley's second bedroom where he stored his junk and unwanted toys that weren't cool or fashionable anymore, usually because he broke them to make sure he got new ones instead. This occurred regularly now that he got play dates with that mongrel Piers Polkiss, who kept telling Dudley that what he had was either lame, out of date or not good enough for a kid like Duds.

Harry sprinted back to the open storage room and began his 'shopping spree' with the alacrity and sternness of somebody who had spent the last two years accompanying Petunia Evans to the grocery store every Saturday that God gave them. He had heard her acrimonious complaints about lack of service, lack of choice, lack of freshness, lack of proteins, lack of vitamins, lack of fibers, and lack of essential oils so many times that he sometimes dreamt about it, when the usual nightmares about evil cackling laughter and bright bursts of green light left him alone. That meant that the child went straight for the three things most necessary in foods; dry packed, pickled in brine and canned. This was because dry packed could be eaten as-is without any prep or heating, while brined needed some water to wash and butter / oil to cook. Canned foods were much more varied, from fruit slices to baked beans in gravy to meatloaf, but you needed many items to open the can then prep the meal. And some like the fruits and vegetables were not a meal by themselves, they needed at least another item like bread, crackers, rice or potatoes to make it a semblance of a plate. Adding meat and condiments was vastly preferable, anyways.

The boy chose wisely a pair of boxes of specially made emergency 'shelter crackers' that had been a staple of British life since WW-II, when they were distributed by the army across the entire kingdom to palliate the food shortages following the destruction of entire cities by Nazi bombings. Everybody in Britain knew the look of the boxes, and schools taught kids that these hard, dry, salted biscuits could be good for nearly a hundred years if their packet wasn't open to let air and moisture inside them. For anybody in dire straights, these were a must, and it reminded Harry that purchasing more would be easy as they were common and cheap to this day.

After that, he realized he needed some butter as spread for the crackers or sandwiches, some oil, salt, pepper and a few spices to cook his canned food to a point where the taste from the metal can and preservatives wouldn't affect his tongue anymore. He took a few cans of fruit and mixed beans, a jar of brined sauerkraut, and several cans of pressed meatloaf or meatballs in gravy that were a big favorite of campers like the Boy Scouts. Towards the end he decided that he was British as everybody else, so he also took a large packet of bulk loose-leaf tea with two jars of powdered 3% milk, a jar of brown sugar and a jar of castor sugar to properly fix his food or drinks to his liking.

As the six year old was about to leave the cold room, he saw a few items on the farthest top shelf that got his attention in a hurry. With his relatives absent for more than 20 hours to come, he had the time to fetch a small folding chair to step on to reach the new loot. It was a reserve of 'adult' materials set aside for Vernon's personal needs, or as bartering goods in case of a real crisis. There were several 250ml bottles of cheap gin, four 1,5L bottles of good whiskey, two 1L tins of cheap bulk tobacco for pipe or rolling your own cigarettes, several bottles of 500ml of lighter fluid, a few different models of lighters, a miniature oil lamp with a 250ml reservoir, boxes of wooden matches, and...

There was an odd lump wrapped in an ancient oiled leather sheet with thread tied around to keep it in place. The thing stank of mineral oil and abandonment in Harry's small hands. The child carefully untied the threads and unfurled the wrapping to unveil the prize, or prizes as it was two distinct items bundled together. Unbeknownst to him, the poor child had found the proof of his uncle's secret folly. He had found an antique dagger with sheath and matching Walther P38 pistol dating back to 1945. Both were standard Nazi Waffen SS equipment that would have been worn by an officer in the dreaded army of the German enemy. Harry's memory of history was not good because he hadn't yet been to school, and what little he knew of the war was from all the books that littered the second bedroom upstairs, where Dudley threw them as he hated reading with passion. Harry had read what he could given his rather passable skills in that vital art, but there was only two books that spoke of the dreadful period of history and as children's picture books,they had scant details and nothing too traumatic to explain.

What he could tell was that the dagger was double edged, straight, with a pair of stylized eagle wings for guard and a flared pommel with a wooden handle, stored in a wooden sheath with steel fittings. The sheath and blade had many engravings of the eagle, swastika and German flag, and a grinning death-head on each. The pistol had a single magazine inside but no bullets; it was dull black with brown wooden handle. It also had eagles, swastikas, German flags and a single death-head on the top of the slide. Stamped along the left side of the barrel was the word 'Totenkopf' but Harry had no earthly idea what that meant.

What the boy did know was that he had just hit the lottery. Every night he heard the radio news programs about how tough British gun laws were, and how hunters, sportsmen and farmers wanting to protect their lands had to fight the constables to have their very few rights respected when they intervened and firearms were involved. Harry knew for a fact that his fat uncle did not have a gun permit, and most certainly had not registered this weapon with the police as the law demanded. Since he couldn't hunt with a pistol and they didn't live in a rural area with wild animals like foxes or crows, the chances of the bobbies giving him a license were nil, so the chance that he did register was not in question. Plus, if what Harry remembered about these symbols was true, then nobody in their right mind would want to show it in public, not unless they were desperate.

Looking at the unholy devices, Harry Potter realized that -HE- was desperate.

Desperate enough in fact that he wrapped the bundle anew and stuffed it in one of the rucksacks for transport to his hidden haven near the park. Since the gun was empty, Harry decided to look for the bullets, on the off chance that Vernon had actually wanted to use the gun for real, in which case he'd need the munitions nearby. It took almost a half hour, but Harry's lucky run kept on giving today; the box of 50 bullets, 9mm Parabellum, was hidden inside a partially emptied tin of cheap coffee that nobody in the family ever drank. Blinking owlishly at the find, Harry realized that like the key for the room, it was placed right next to where the bundle had lain, in case the contents was needed. Furthermore, the child realized also that it was the only tin of coffee in the entire storage room that he had seen, so it would be hard for Vernon to grab the wrong one during a rushed response to an emergency.

Harry grabbed a pair of 250ml bottles of gin since he knew this brand could actually be used as a wound disinfectant or fire starting fluid in a bind. He also took the mini oil lamp with lighter fluid, more matches, three of the lighters that could stay lit when you let go of the trigger and the tin of tobacco. Three months back, he had watched television when the Dursley's were out for the evening with the preacher's family and saw a news report about the homeless in London. Many smoked the pipe or cigarettes because the nicotine affected the stomach, curbing hunger pangs and cutting the need to eat, something these poor souls knew about far too much. So Harry being forewarned, took what he foresaw that he would need quite soon. With both sacks full, he took the old but completely full box of bullets last, then placed the tin back on the shelf and moved the bottles and boxes to hide the empty spot where the bundle had been stashed.

Carefully resetting the shelves in the storage room just as his aunt liked her pantry and closets to be managed, the boy erased traces of his passage as best he could without putting back everything he took. Then he carefully lugged his bounty up the stairs and closed the door locked, after making certain he hadn't left footprints on the hard wood risers to betray his movements in the forbidden area. He did a quick tour of the house to make sure everything was closed and secure before grabbing his thin windbreaker and ratty baseball cap, put on his taped-up trainers, got the spare key from the hiding place under the flower vase on the vestibule table and got out to do his emergency run to his hidden safe-zone.

Thankfully, he was able to get there without troubles or attracting unwanted attention, unpack the bags and order the stuff a bit, then return home before the time the Dursley's normally had evening tea when thy stayed home. Since the car was not present, nobody paid attention to the house, and since the lights would not be on until Harry came back, it attracted the eyes even less.

Harry did not know it yet, but the decision to steal the Nazi gun and dagger would be the changing point of his young life, since it indicated that he had already chosen, in the depths of his heart, that he could have to be violent, deadly even, to guarantee his safety. One secretive master Manipulator would see his plans destroyed by this, and he personally would never recover from the shock when he realized the depths of his mistakes.

Poor, miserable, no-good house-elf Dryskholl does good at long last

(Harry Potter - theme)

August 1986  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

The great, mighty and implacable 'Servant of -THE- Greater Good' Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, he of the many titles and acclaims, was yet again proven to be a no-good bad master whiskers to all of elvendom.

Over the last five years, the elderly crone of a magus had obliged the poor, miserable little house-elf named Dryskholl to accomplish the lowest, basest of ignominious chores. The felon wizard had forced the gentle, serviceable being to watch silently, from afar, what the poor cursed and potioned muggles inflicted upon the defenseless infant Harry Potter. The elf was witness to all of the indifference, setting-aside, abuse, brutality and eventually, the family turning their backs on the poor child when he began to disappear for hours and days on end without giving any explanations.

Dryskholl was as severely limited biologically and culturally as all of his elvish kindred, needing external magic to survive and thinking that only serving wizards or goblins would provide this. As he had been 'given clothes' at a young age by the evil family of dark wizards he was born into because he was too small and sickly, the poor creature had little choice to find an alternative home post haste to live. Albus saw this clearly and shamelessly exploited the vulnerabilities of yet another innocent for the glory of his own image and the furtherance of his evil schemes.

Thus, Dryskholl was bound to Hogwarts, and through her the will of the felonious headmaster who wanted nothing less than to enslave all beings to his whims while he still lived. The only small relief that was granted the elf was the sure knowledge that Dumbledore was too squeamish to practice necromancy to elongate his life or bypass Death's dominion. All the elf needed to be fully free was to outlive the cruel bastard, which shouldn't be that hard given how old the man was. Even the greatest transmutations that could heal, prolong life or transfer souls between bodies demanded a price, an 'Equivalent Exchange' for what was produced, and again Dumbledore wouldn't pay those particular tithes, fearing the loss of his magicks or sanity.

So, in accordance to his stated chores, Dryskholl watched silently over the Potter Heir to insure his survival and basic health, but never interfered unless he was truly at risk of death, coma, maiming or permanent handicapping of a necessary bodily function. Those were the terms set by Dumbledore; he could intervene but never upon a human directly, and never interact with them in a manner that they became aware of his presence & identity. So, the elf used basic household charms to clean & fix the child's meager clothes until they were so worn that the spells no longer took hold. He used invisible micro-portation to place healing herbs into what little food he could get to eat, especially away from the Dursley's. This led the elf to debasement as he began to pop around the bins and dumpsters of restaurants in nearby cities to find enough food that was still edible to cobble together snacks that he would 'lose' near where Harry was walking by, making it appear as though another human had dropped or abandoned it half-eaten. Dryskholl also had to magically put the child in deep healing slumber when he slept in his cupboard, under the house's staircase, because his innate magic just didn't have the resources or reserves to cure his ailments or repair injuries his kin had inflicted. On a few occasions, the elf had stolen potions from Albus himself to spell them into the sleeping boy's stomach to save his life and health.

Then the boy reached the age of 6, at which all muggles are to attend primary school near where they lived, a practice know as 'compulsory' because the only legal alternatives were a private school or a certified home tutor, which would be verified. Vernon would never spend any money on his nephew as long as Dumbledore's elixirs and curses flowed through him, so the boy was sent, quite unwillingly, to the local elementary. This caused a fit of anger because they now had to spend time and money on fixing the kid's appearance and health enough to not trigger an investigation by the Child Protection Services (CPS). Thusly, Harry finally got some glasses to partially correct his severe nearsightedness and was even taken to a dentist to clean his teeth. After that he had to go to a pediatrician because both the optometrist and dentist threatened to report the adults if they didn't get proof of behavioral changes on their parts inside the very week. This meant that the poor boy finally received the muggle vaccines he should already have gotten at the same time as Dudley, and a full record of his injuries was made.

Normally, the doctor and nurse would have reported the family to CPS or the police, but Dryskholl bent his orders yet again. He imitated his evil lord's methods by using strong compulsions that were attached to the photos and paperwork to convince the personnel to harangue the Dursley adults themselves, then negotiate with them better living conditions for the child. In reality, the elf understood that they would not feed or heal him any better, but they might be scared of the authorities enough to at least leave him at peace. This would be such an improvement for his health that the elf wondered if some natural instinct or curse-mandated reflex inside the Dursley's wouldn't make it unachievable.

As it were, the compulsions on the doctors held, and they managed to bullshit the family enough to make them pull back from physically hurting the child in their care. However, as Dryskholl had foreseen, they also stopped paying attention to his well-being and movements altogether. This was good because when Dumbledore rescinded the elf's chores and orders, he never commanded him to ignore the family or abandon Harry Potter to his mess. The only order he was given firmly was to never speak of the manipulations with any house-elf, portrait or ghost that was bound to Hogwarts, as well as no humans or Goblins at all, which still left the door wide open for quite a few things to happen. After all, Dumbledore had not mentioned house-elves, portraits or ghosts in service to other people, nor did he bar him from speaking to half-breeds like Hagrid or Flitwick, or other species like centaurs, dwarves, halflings, fae, minotaurs, orcs, ogres, trolls, and even snakes or dragons if a parselmouth could be found to translate the animals.

Yes, Albus thought he had been quite wise, ingenious and masterful in his manipulation of the lower life-form that was the servile, juvenile elfling. He was wrong, as he often was, but did not see it because his hubris and bigotry blinkered his eyes to the reality around him.

Dryskholl promptly took his partial freedom to watch over Harry Potter from afar, silently and discretely as always. The child was ignorant of magic and the ministry laws stated that only his family, magical CPS or the school that had his name in the Book of Souls could tell him. But it didn't keep the elf from helping far more directly than before, so long as he kept invisible and never touched the boy unless his life was in dire peril. That meant that the small elfling was joyful when the human boy found the abandoned workman's shelter, under the railways that led towards London's center. It was Dryskholl who fixed the potable water plumbing to insure the child had running fresh water,just as he cleared out the drainage pipes, and then the ventilation grates that allowed outside air to circulate inside the enclosed space. The elf unstuck the flue in the stove pipe, repaired the rusty old wood burning stove, and solidified the rickety old bed frames. While Harry was stealing from his family, the elf went around the cities he knew to find abandoned or discarded mattresses, bedding and cushions to pile up in a secure location. He then cleaned, sanitized and fluffed all the items that would be dropped near the tunnel's entry periodically, as if some lack-wit idiot had just dumped his trash in a public place as happened often, specifically for the child to find when he walked around his haven.

Upon seeing just how autonomous Harry had become since his medical visits and new glasses, the elf realized that he could perhaps help in different ways. One manner was by moving more of the park's dead-fall wood near the tunnel's entry, in the area Harry searched for fuel and materials for whittling little devices he thought were necessary. It was a harmless amusement and if he botched something terribly then he could just burn it in the stove. Dryskholl combed the entire park and piled up all the lost objects he found, repairing them as good as new then sporadically placed them in or near the tunnel so the child could find them. The elf was surprised that the human boy would often sell the objects at the pawn shop or trade them with the schoolkids for other things that were more useful in his life. That was a smart move showing a keen mind and capacity to plan ahead for prolonged jobs or harsher times of worsened poverty.

Amazed by the boy's innate cleverness, the elfling popped into muggle bookstores at night and browsed the shelves to find what he believed would help the boy even more. His old family had stressed quite firmly that "knowledge is power; therefore keeping mudbloods ignorant is an act to insure our dominance" so he would find the best books and magazines to help educate the abandoned child for the life to come. Dryskholl selected survival & camping guidebooks made by the Boy Scouts of Britain, with homesteading manuals designed to help small farms endure and prosper. A domestic first aid guide and familial health booklet from CPS were added the moment he saw them, plus another book for growing medicinal herbs in a home garden. A few hobby beginner's guides for home-crafting with wood, wool, rope, leather, metal and glass were put in the basket, along books on plumbing, electricity, carpentry, pottery and forging.

Then the elf found about a very tightly controlled set of books that few shops carried but would be directly helpful to his unknowing charge; 'doomsday preppers' and 'sovereign citizenship'. These books didn't all look very serious or credible, so the young elf had to take the time to skim through and evaluate each, instead of just reading the abstract on the rear cover like sufficed for all the previous texts. However, he did find better, more complete survival guides dedicated to the British weather zone, as well as a homesteader's guide to dealing with predators and thieves when far removed from urban areas and human help. He was surprised to find seriously written guides about living homeless in a big city or rural area, back-packing & squatting, dealing with bullies, street thugs or gangs. The nastiest bit was when he accidentally discovered a specialty therapy booklet destined to children surviving and recovering from violence at home, in school or having fled a warzone. To this lurid lot he added one last guidebook, entirely about the laws of the UK by territory and what were the limits of police powers and bureaucratic bosses, "something that all children, street dwellers and independent-minded people needed to read" the abstract said.

Powerfully disheartened by some of his latest finds, Dryskholl nonetheless decided that it was worth the risk to take some time in those questionable bookshops that specialized in serious, professional survivalism and warfare prepping. Given that the UK had suffered the Nazi raids not long ago, the elfling thought Harry could use all the help he could find, and he had stolen the big knife and pow-pow from Vernon, so he must have made some decisions about that already. The lonely elf soon realized that the bookshops he wanted were in fact army surplus stores or even unmarked, not-so-legal warehouses where discrete trades of texts, weapons, munitions, chemicals and forbidden military or governmental knowledge occurred in the dead of night.

Motivated by his true desire to see the young child alive, healthy and free from the shackles some would bind him with, the elfling patiently scrutinized the more deleterious inventories he found, regardless of how disturbed he became at the sight. Due to the bearded bastard and his long-term plans, he took a manual destined to train soldiers against commercial, religious or governmental propaganda to educate the boy's mind against verbal and emotional manipulations. This was followed by an antique MI-5 guide, dated 1967, about drugs, poisons, antidotes and using small doses of toxins to slowly build-up tolerances or immunities. With a great shiver of shame, the elf took a just-published British SAS officer's guide to surviving capture and imprisonment by the enemy, resisting interrogation & torture, and passing through the trauma without losing their sanity.

Seeing the great evils that human could do even without magic, the poor elf became vicious in his choice of books to bring back. He selected one of the first known copies of 'The terrorist's cookbook, ed. 1988' and another old MI-5 manual about infiltration, spying, sabotage & traps in a guerilla context. Remembering again what Harry had stolen from Vernon, the elfling began to peruse for seriously written, professional books about World War I & II from all perspectives, with a specific emphasis on the personal lives, training, discipline and equipment of the soldiers on each side. Then he had to truly search long and hard until he found a guide about farmers' guns, their usage & safety measures. The elfling struck gold when he chanced upon an old trade-school gunsmithing manual from 1974 that was used in the British army to train armorers.

After much internal debate, Dryskholl searched for beginner's books about self-defense, fighting, combat and formal warfare, which lead him to finally find some texts about World War II and the many resistance & insurgency movements it spawned across the planet. The poor elf took the horrid college-level tomes with shaking hands as he thought of Dumbledore and the many crimes he had in the works. Poor Harry Potter would need to know these things if he were to stay free.

There were a lot of pamphlets, guides, manuals and books in the secret cache the poor lonely elfling used as his home-base away from Hogwarts, but it was giving him ideas too. First he would order everything by how immediately important it was for Harry to learn and master the skills taught in the texts, then sort the books into piles by level of competency to make small packages of mixed subjects all at the same degree of complexity. This would allow the child to develop across many domains and choose those he wanted to put efforts into, thus aiding the elf in choosing what to drop near him on the subsequent 'gifts'. None of the books would be thrown away or sent back, as Dryskholl had decided that if Harry bypassed a subject presently, nothing kept him from reading it later when the need or desire manifested.

The frail elfling realized in his few last sorties through the survivalist shops and army surplus stores that he too was in grave danger from Dumbledore. He knew too much, and his oaths of silence and obedience were towards the school, not the man himself. If he was ever removed from his headmastership, then the elf could ignore his orders and speak his dire secrets to anybody willing to listen. So, the decision was easy; as he sorted and prepared the educational care packages for his charge, Dryskholl read through everything thoroughly, becoming one of the first house-elves of Britain with a radical socialist view of race relations, civil society, police powers and government at large. He was also the very first house-elf that he knew of who managed to learn how to operate and maintain several types of small guns that he stole from petty muggle criminals in multiple cities. He set up a secondary home-base in a wild area, deep in the forest on the Calf-of-Man island, in the central oceanic channel of the Kingdom between England and Ireland, to store his guns and munitions. He quickly spelled himself an underground practice tunnel to shoot at empty bottles or wooden targets he crafted manually as a way to pass those times when Harry was in school and didn't need him nearby. By necessity of his lonely life, the elfling became quite good at cooking diverse types of foods or whittling wood while reading books or newspapers of muggle and magical origins, with the wizarding wireless playing in the background. Due to his isolation when he was away from Harry, the elf clung to each scrap of culture or education he could find, thusly slowly making himself amongst the most erudite and well informed of his kindred.

By the end of the first year of elementary school, Harry Potter would have several dozen practical books in his bunker, sitting on wooden shelves he made himself, plus several highly questionable street-smarts, homeless & off-grid living, and tactical survival guides. Occasionally, he would find and bring back a historic or political book that he felt a 'gut feeling' about bringing home to read, because he felt an innate certitude that if he had more and better general knowledge, then people wouldn't be able to use him as a damned doormat to wipe their feet in his defenseless face, like his relatives had done all his life.

Albus Dumbledore's grandiose criminal plans, seditious schemes and treasonous manipulations of the magical and muggle populations had just been broken in secret by a young, frail and sickly house-elf who refused to let his morality and dignity be profaned by a fool. Nobody would know about it for a great many years to come, and by then, it would be far too late to change course.

Harry's elementary mis-education

(Harry Potter - theme)

1986 – 1991  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

Petunia Evans was as she had always been; jealous of her sister and disdainful of her supposed otherworldly powers. She also knew that her sister had stopped believing in their Lord Jesus in the third year of her magical schooling for reasons that were still nebulous as the younger woman had never explained herself. What Petunia knew to be true was that witches were wicked, cursed fools and she would have no truck with them, as commanded by the Bible of their Lord Savior.

Vernon was a bit more direct in his approach to the situation; he could have accepted magic if he had seen examples of it being useful around the house, or for healing illness and injuries. Should it have been demonstrated clearly that these capacities were for more than scaring or hurting people, then he would have accepted it in his life, even if only as a work tool. Therefore, his way of handling Harry was to 'beat the stupid and snob' out of him the moment he became aware of a misdeed or errant behavior, but he was prepared to reward the child if he did something truly helpful for the household. However, given that Vernon had a bad case of innate bigotry and was himself rather lazy, the chance that he would ever reward his 'indentured serf' was nil. The boy was simply far too useful as a meek, pliable servant to start bolstering his pride and self-worth.

The strange thing though, was that despite both adults being indisposed towards their nephew, neither ever did any genuine effort at finding out where he disappeared all day since April of 1986 had passed. The two parents knew that it was not normal or acceptable to let a child barely six years old haunt the streets all day, and some nights too, but something inside their minds made them not care. They no longer cared for his welfare, but most telling was that they also no longer valued the opinions of the neighbors, school officials, police or CPS if it came to that. For better or worse, the Dursley adults had completely disconnected from their nephew and nothing, not even Dumbledore's curses and alchemies, would ever change that.

Poor little Harry Potter had to trudge his way from wherever he had spent the night, with a full backpack, over to the disheartening, soul-warping patch of malevolence where the poorest kids from all over Little Whining were obliged to attend. Dudley instead was sent to a private primary school in Greater Whining, which sent a noisy yellow minibus to pick him up on the street corner next to Wisteria Lane with two other pupils. Dudley had a classic grey pants & white shirt uniform whilst Harry had whatever rags he managed to cobble-up for himself that day.

{ HP } --- { The root of evil } --- { HP }

So it was, on a dreary September 1 of 1986 that Harry Potter entered officially as a pupil of the local school; the Vice-Archiduke Ulyrance Van Uttebatten - GCVO public elementary academy. As befits an establishment with such a grandiose antiquated name, the buildings were old to the point of decrepitude as they had more-or-less survived the World War II bombings just enough to be repaired rather than torn down.

First built in the late 1700's as a wooden five storey tower to hold orphans and sickly children too poor for even the local church hospice, it burned down in 1789 due to the kids rioting against the abuses they suffered. It was then rebuilt as a Borstal type of corrective school from 1799 to 1868 when yet another massive riot by the juvenile inmates caused fires and a partial collapse. The second rebuild was done in 1873 as a pauper's public school for ages 6 to 12, at which age guilds and companies could hire apprentices to tend the basest menial jobs. That incarnation lasted until the 1939-45 period when the WW-II bombings destroyed the edifice, making the city planners of the day draft up a much bigger and modern design. The deluded buffoons had hoped the new layout and utilities, electricity & gas, would make such an upgrade from wood stoves and oil lamps that it would forcibly change the social atmosphere from the ancient decadence and violence over to a new openness and free learning. Instead, the imbeciles produced a large complex that was still cramped and decrepit-looking, even where it wasn't actually rotting to pieces.

The very worse part though, was that the new complex still made everybody inside it's brutalist cement walls feel claustrophobic and ground-down to nothing, pushing them towards emotional break-downs and outbursts of unmanageable anger and violence. The living, working and teaching conditions inside the ill-built school complex were such a mental hardship that the district reserved this posting as a punishment for those personnel that they hadn't managed to rid themselves of yet, and as a tool to break-in the idealistic young fools the ministry of education tried to send them every once in a while.

The cold, unwelcoming play yard was half asphalt and half cold, drab dirt and gravel without a piece of greenery in view.

The main building was the academy proper with the ground floor assembly hall, first floor mess hall and three floors of classrooms. A glass walled solarium on the rooftop served as lounge for the staff members between class times, during the ever-present British rains and snows.

The second biggest building was the gymnasium & swimming pool that was built all the way across the play yard so that the noises from the over active children didn't bother the classes or administrators. The gymnasium had been built in early 1946 so it was made of solid steel framing covered in thick concrete with a rounded roof so as to deflect the explosive forces of bombs. The building had been viewed as a civilian shelter, in case the war started up again, so there were large communal bathrooms & showers, a commercial galley kitchen, and several fireplaces molded directly into the concrete walls to warm the refugees that would sleep all over the main floor. The basement was practically abandoned since construction; it was split into eight storage bunkers and the machinery room for the pool's pumps and filters. Under the gym's machinery room was located another level, a sub-basement with two large tractor engines that served as generators in case of emergency, making just enough electricity to light up the panic lights across campus. In this level were located all the hubs that spread utilities to the school; the junction box where the city's power lines entered, the main natural gas pipe, the potable water aqueduct, and a hatch to the antique brick sewer tunnels that ran under Little Whining for close to 150 years.

The administrative building was built in the same period as the gym, because the predecessor had gotten a bloody big Nazi V-2 rocket in the broad side, collapsing on impact. The new structure was built on top of the still usable foundations of the wrecked edifice, saving work and money but creating a dark, dank basement level where nobody ventured. The visible part was split in four sectors; the ground floor with the receptionist & mail desk and the staff mess hall, the two floors of teacher's offices followed by the two floors of actual administrators, and finally a glass walled solarium on the rooftop. The only fully renovated and up-to-date place in the building was the principal's office suite which included his secretary's desk & waiting area, his own office, the reserved bathroom and butler's pantry for his tea set and snacks. Under the edifice's used spaces lay the foundations, two levels of ancient brick and mortar structure that had survived two centuries of hardship and violence. The first basement was a long corridor with ten locked supplies bunkers, five to each side, holding the wartime civilian safety & rescue materials to make the population endure through another conflict. The second, oldest, basement was split in three large rooms; the building's ancient machinery & boilers, the coal bunker and finally the school's dirtiest secret from a bygone era – the Renaissance Era's punishment room.

On the left side of the administrative building, between it and the gymnasium, had been added about ten years ago a small brick and galvanized steel garage. The structure was only the ground floor with four double-space roll-top doorways giving place for 4 large trucks or vans. This was were the newly revamped "technology initiation & machine-shop" classes were held instead of the dreary old basement beneath the admins. The slanted steel sheet roof and foggy tiny windows gave the place an air of being abandoned to squatters right from the opening in 1977.

{ HP } --- { Suffer the children } --- { HP }

Harry had been warned by his relatives about the kind of school he was being sent to attend; they had no care for his welfare and even less for his mind or learning. They had chosen to not spend a penny on him, and as long as he was registered at Van Uttebatten academy, the bloody CPS would not look further. They especially would not look at any injuries or welts he had as that might lead back to the teaching staff's heavy-handed approach to instilling discipline and docility into the litter of mangy mongrels they were saddled with. Vernon gleefully explained that as the school's personnel were all unionized, none could be fired without dragging them, and the school district's uppity bosses, through a public trial in Her Majesty's court. Something that nobody in their right mind would ever do for a wastrel bum like Harry 'your parents were drunks' Potter.

Lesson #1 before he even left the door of Number 4 Privet Drive; shut the fuck up and obey or you'll hurt something fierce, and the adults will enjoy doing it to you.

Lesson #2; the morality or humanity of laws doesn't matter, because of you have enough coppers and guns on your side even the most inhumane laws will be applied.

Lesson #3; give enough people money or a parcel of power of their own and they'll gladly help you crush others to your liking, no matter how monstrous the method and result.

Lesson #4; he was alone, he had no outside help, and the kids would probably treat him like Dudley had done, so no succor from them. Each child would be trying to survive the schoolyard bullies, the violent teachers, the perverted admins, and the other perverts that would be roaming around the complex to grab the weakest of the lot.

Harry had been secretly reading the local and national newspapers for several months, stacking up the periodicals in his bunker as fuel for his stove so he made the effort to read them before they helped him to stay warm in is safe little hole. That meant that he knew already what hellish den of perdition his relatives had consigned him to, and he had tried to prepare his mind and body as much as any abandoned 6 year old boy could manage. One of the things he had come to learn from the papers and a small battery-powered radio he had scrounged from a neighbor's bin was that Van Uttebatten academy was NOT the worse place he could go. The academy was still near where he had made his small home, and he would only attend during regular school hours.

In comparison, the church-run Saint Ignatiorus da Repentatori residential school, secure center for holding street-kids & young male delinquents, located in the forested rural area farther south by about 30 kilometers, was built like a genuine castle-prison. It was wrapped by 15 feet high stone walls dating back 131 years, and the buildings were around 174 years old with precious few utilities or services to be found. The austere sect of catholic Jesuits that operated the establishment had never allowed the local council nor the national ministries of Justice of Family Services to come poke their heads into their affairs. They had no choice but to modernize while repairing the damages suffered from WW-II like everybody else, but that was the limit tolerated by the doddering elderly priests. Harry's poor, miserable life would end very shortly if he were sent there, as he would be incarcerated around the clock, without family visits or furloughs of any sorts. The papers were rife with St-Ignatorus' reputation for cruelty, injuring and handicapping the boys in their custody, and almost every boy that left the place had been raped repeatedly by multiple priests or lay custodians.

Shivers of dread crawling down his spine as he remembered the alternative while staring up at the massive drab gray building of Van Uttebatten's façade, the abandoned child decided that he would do absolutely -ANYTHING- to avoid going anywhere worse. He would probably have to endure torments of mind and body, but as long as rape or whoring himself wasn't asked, he would try to endure. His only alternative was to ditch formal primary schooling and any chance to a secondary school afterwards by living in the streets full-time. However, Harry had quickly realized that he was the only child of any age that was completely abandoned in his village. If the coppers wanted to find him, they would have little efforts to make before they found his precious bunker and belongings. His only truly safe alternative would be to go off-grid in a rural area, far from prying eyes, but he had never done any camping or scouting in his life, so he wasn't sure if he could survive in the harsh British winter, given how young, small, underfed and meek he was.

Want it or not, this inhuman monolith of concrete would be his life for the coming five years, and he -HAD- to adapt, find ways to survive and dodge trouble, or else he might as well jump off the roof to end it on his own terms. What a joyful thought on his first day of school. It certainly wasn't the freedom and help he had dreamed about when he was locked in his cupboard!

{ HP } --- { Year 1; 1986 - 87 } --- { HP }

The first year was harsh, demeaning and beyond brutal in many ways for all the children who were forced to attend the Van Uttebatten institution. All of them were bloody well aware they were the shittiest turds floating in Britain's sewers, beneath the feet of their betters in life and society, as was Just, Proper and Civilized under God. Any suspicion that a child was not blindly accepting of this propaganda had the culprit dragged by the ear to the front of the classroom for a thrashing on the seat of their pants with a swishy rattan cane. If more than just one teacher or staffer complained to the principal about the child's indocility or lack of blind belief, the little hellion was then grabbed by a pair of stout custodians and dragged kicking and screaming to the antiquated punishment room in the second basement of the administration building. Few children ever spoke aloud of what the actual sanctions were, but they always came back littered with welts, bruises and occasional broken arm or leg because they tried to struggle free of their tormentors' vices. Apparently, getting summoned to the head office for a bare-arsed caning that left bleeding stripes on the skin was still proven as much safer and less painful than whatever was done by the school's thugs in the hidden basement room.

Right in the first week, Harry heard, and verified, that two different boys had been dragged to the basement and come back injured enough to require a trip to the nearby pauper's clinic to be patched up. Likewise, he saw with his own eyes no less than four classroom canings and heard a pair of teachers at noon meal brag about "having hauled a fucking little trublion to the principal to set some cuts on his chubby lower cheeks". Seeing and hearing directly the proof of the staff's utter lack of care for their wards, the poor neglected child lowered his head and affected an air of silent, compliant despair from then on. He never raised his hand in class, answered -VERY- politely to all adults, and absolutely never questioned the rules or protocols in place, even when he could see they were stupid or obsolete in today's society.

Having six years of life with the Dursley's may not be much in terms of experience, but it was enough to have comparatives and know that the people in Van Uttebatten academy weren't really trying to teach anything to anybody. The school was truly just a part-time, cheaper version of what St-Ignatorius claimed to do thoroughly full-time, with permanent results. That meant that Harry concentrated solely on his studies, books, and handing in completed homework or tests without ever challenging the grades given, foregoing any ideas of making friends for moral support and a social life at long last. This wasn't the place or time for that sort of self-delusion, and pretty much anything, including sneezing while the teacher was lecturing, could earn you an immediate six strokes of the cane, which no kid in their right mind would contest as they all knew what the other punishments would escalate into.

The good thing about tyrannies that are run by multiple tyrants at the same time was that such characters rarely played well together as a team. Normally, tyrants were lazy bums who brutalized their victims to enslave them into doing the work for them, so they rarely put a lot of effort into anything that wasn't their vices or the violence needed to keep slaves at work. The very predictable result of the staff assembled in Van Uttebatten was that the principal had a few favorite teachers who were given badges as "Senior Educator" while the rest were simply "Teacher" or "Junior teacher" as per the regulations. The senior educators could punish a child in their classroom any way they wanted, including removing clothing by force to hit skin, or they could convoke the culprit to their personal office for a 'severe sanction' that was still beneath the notice of the admins. Woe betide the poor foolish child that didn't realize quickly that trying to dodge the summons or denying it was issued would mean an automatic trip to the head office followed by an even worse descent to the cruelties of the basement's punishment room.

The kids had to hurry to learn which teachers were neglectful, lazy, passively cruel, actively cruel or genuinely perverted, and react accordingly if they wanted to survive with most of their limbs and organs functional. After the first month, nobody was stupid enough to think about coming out of the place healthy or completely sane. It was like living in a trench with both enemy sniper fire and rogue assassins happening at all moments of the day, sometimes without any actual reason too. The traumatized kids who were better socialized, or better at living on the streets, also came to perceive that many of the adult personnel had been severely impacted by their workplace and the immoral, criminal rules set by the directorate. Several teachers overtly smoked tobacco or weed, drank tea or coffee with alcohol in it that smelled throughout the classes they taught, and often enough a nameless custodian would sit at the desk, telling them to read silently because the teacher was out sick today. Some teachers were sick a lot, it seemed.

In October, the second month of school, Harry saw one of the few young girls, aged 8, that attended their sector of Hell on Earth step unto the parapets of the administrative wing and jump down to die as she impacted the unforgiving asphalt of the yard beneath. All the children watched from their classroom windows as the black hearse bearing the official crest of the municipal police came to recover the mangled corpse in utter silence, without a bobby in sight to investigate or write a report. The child's suicide was later attributed by the rumor mill to the fact she had just been in one of those 'special convocations' in a teacher's office, and she killed herself immediately after. That weekend, while Harry was discretely skulking around the back alleys and commercial streets in search of food and winter gear, he heard a pair of elderly constables talking on a bistro's terrace, as they spiked their cheap tea with even cheaper gin from hip flasks that had been stamped with their precinct and unit names as if it were normal. The two old bobbies chatted about the poor little tyke that the sawbones had gone to pick up from Creep-Utte, as they called the school. Both men had sighed forlornly about the fact she had just been raped before she jumped, given her hymen was torn and she had lesions in both vagina and anus still bleeding fresh, wounds that a head-first jump off a building would never produce.

Harry stayed silent as he crept away from the dangerous source of information, and never discussed the facts with anybody, not even when outside the school's campus. If there was one thing that life with the Dursley's had taught him young, it was that criminals always had plenty of friends in low places you couldn't see, and you were never as alone or secure in your secret talking spot as you believed to be.

{ HP } --- { This means WAR! } --- { HP }

Harry had learned much from his books about surviving the harshness of homeless life on the streets in a city. The stories about street gangs, thugs, perverts and how the youngest kids could sometimes act like wild dogs when they were starved or sick had impressed him in a bad way. That was why Harry had made efforts at finding small pieces of metal that he could file down into small shivs or stouter medium shanks to defend himself from grabby hands or bullies. There was no logical way he could carry his Nazi dagger & pistol in school where there was no privacy at all, and an army of scared kids wanting to earn reprieve from the adults who would denounce him the moment they saw any abnormality. The metal shivs were barely two inches long by a half-inch wide, and thin like a cheap letter opener. The shanks were five inches long by two inches wide, thick like a good dinner knife. Both types of blades had a three inch handle wrapped in plastic sheeting to keep them thin and easy to hide under his too-large shirt sleeves or hems.

It was a good thing he had been armed since one of the younger teachers had 'convoked' him to his office on the last day of class, just before the mandatory Christmas break. Little Harry had to cut the man across the tops of his hands and forearms to escape from a rape attempt after the man tried to forcibly rip-off his ratty clothes, supposedly to apply corporal punishments, without telling the boy what he had done wrong or what the pain would be. When the enraged felon tried to prevent Harry from escaping his office by jumping on him like a wrestler, the desperate child had no choice but to flail around wildly with his blades still in his hands. It wasn't like he had any fighting training, but what choice did he have? He ended up hitting the domineering male several times around his face and neck before the massive weight dragged them both to the floor. Harry was knocked out for a few minutes, only to wake up in the puddle of congealing blood, still under the cooling corpse of the dead rapist. In his panicked resistance, Harry had struck the man in the left eyeball, in the right ear, twice across the chin, four times across the throat, and a dozen times around the collarbones. The inevitable result was death by blood loss from too many cut arteries. The man bled out inside of roughly 40 seconds, well beyond any help the other staffers could have given.

That was the moment that Harry realized just how thickly insulated and sound-proofed the teachers' and admins' offices were, so they could attack and molest kids at their leisure without ever having witnesses. Taking advantage of the providential silence, the child decided that he had to plan for the worse case; being discovered and forced to run out of town to live in a remote rural zone. He started by the obvious, searching the body's pockets for any tools or valuables, then the desk and the rest of the small office. The wooden desk drawers weren't locked, thus allowing the boy to quickly find a small trove of pocket knives and artisanal blades like his that the teacher had seized over the years. A more modern multi-tool based off the Swiss Army knife system was the biggest and most reliable piece in the pile, so Harry took that one first, plus two five inch folding knives that looked matched, and the only obviously dedicated combat knife that had a two-edged 8 inch straight blade with a matching sheath. Next to the blades was a small black box that looked like a garage door opener; a battery-powered contact stunner. Harry triggered it to see if the sparkers worked, and also added that to his pockets. A short 12 inch metal rod with a rubber handle and round ball at the end wound up being a telescoping baton, similar to those used by juvie cops on the telly's news programs, when they visited a reform school or took delinquents to court. Since that was a good, reliable and very silent device, the child took it as well without hesitation.

Besides, it was free... Why let something pass and miss out when he needed it?

The other drawers held four new 12-packs of cheap French tobacco cigarettes and a dozen small 100ml glass bottles of English alcohol, gin, brandy and scotch whiskey mixed in a lot. In the same drawer were several candy bars and small sacs of jujubes or hard candies. With a disgusted face, Harry realized that he had stumbled on the pervert's 'rewards & payments' for getting his victims to cooperate willingly to his demands. Never before had the phrase "Stranger – Danger!" made so much sense as it did now. Especially when he looked at the three individually wrapped cakes that were normally sold eight per carton. The pastries were probably safe to take, but the small glass vial and antique glass syringe next to them was clearly a bad sign. Trying to read the label on the vial, Harry saw it spelled in bad handwriting "Happy sleep" and nothing else.

Shivering in dread at what could have happened to his poor self if he had ever accepted a cake or candy bar from this man almost had him vomiting in the bin next to the desk. Except that Harry had lived on the streets enough to have developed a stronger stomach than most 6 year old's. Taking his courage with both hands, the boys stole all the edibles and the syringe as he had almost no medical supplies, so this could be a boon in disguise. At worse, he could sell it to a junkie in an alley for a pair of quid. The other drawers were useless, filled with school paperwork or students' homework assignments that should have been graded over the holidays.

The rest of the office was a better help. The tea set was ugly as a wet turd, but the small utensils on the tray were sterling silver wrought in an old style that nobody liked anymore. That was good tradable stuff so Harry piled it near the door. Seeing the quantity of what he was going to loot out of the room, the child realized two problems; he would need a way to carry it all, and he couldn't be seen in the corridors with sacks full of loot. The other kids, at the very least, would bitch and pester him, but, at worse, another teacher or custodian could become interested and ask questions they should never think about. Thinking slowly, Harry's eyes fell upon the dial of the old clock mounted above the brick fireplace that each office had, in case electricity and gas gave out in the middle of a rainstorm or winter. It was nearly 17:00pm, almost an hour passed the end of the last class. And it was a Friday, too! That meant that almost all of the kids had already left, unless they had gotten hijacked by an adult for a last bit of perving before Hols. In any case, even most adults would have begun leaving if they hadn't already. The secretaries certainly closed their section of the campus by 15:15pm every day, no matter what. The women wanted no truck with the depravities that regularly occurred after class hours, and did their shifts specifically to avoid being witness or accomplice to anything they could avoid being aware of.

Smiling nastily, the child walked to the windows to discretely look outside, towards the small patch of the play yard and parking lot he could see. Almost all the cars were gone, but he didn't know who drove what, so it didn't help any. The yard was deserted, but then again it always was since no child wanted to stay near the hellish pit if they had an option to go elsewhere, including the few group fosterage homes that were located in the neighborhood. Harry pulled the curtains closed tightly and closed the harsh fluorescent tubes mounted to the ceiling, opting for the dimmer stained glass reading lamps spread around the room. Their softer, shaded glow had less chance of being seen from outside to attract attention where he wanted secrecy.

Now ensconced in a warm and locked room, he had all the time to search for bags or a caddy to haul his loot safely. Opening the closet built into the wall near the entrance door, he found a short jacket that could serve as a winter trench-coat for his diminutive size, an old umbrella, a pair of rubber galoshes that were far too big, and a small rucksack that seemed half-full. Opening the bag, Harry snorted in amusement as it seemed that the pervert had thought like him; he had prepped a go-bag in case he was discovered by somebody who didn't accept bribes or threats. Smirking at the cold corpse lying on the bloodied carpet a few feet away, Harry pulled out the three breath mint tins that held folded bills and coins totaling some 400 pounds in notes plus another hundred pounds in small change. Nodding approvingly at his haul, the child pulled out of the sack a camping hatchet, a cheap 12 inch Bowie knife, a cheap imitation Swiss Army knife with barely a dozen tools on it, one 6-pack of 8 hour candles, wooden matches, a cheap compass, a cheap rubber & plastic wristwatch, and a road-map of the county with four red 'X' marked.

The one thing that lit-up Harry's curiosity were two small leather pouches that were closed with a metal zipper. One was rather rectangular and bulky; it was a travel hygiene kit with a bottle of dehydrated shaving cream powder, a little furry thing to lather the cream, a straight razor with a packet of 5 extra blades, a comb, a wooden hairbrush, a toothbrush and paste tube, mouthwash, a bottle of paracetamol, some Gravol tablets and cough syrup. Yep, all good to go, and useful too!

The smaller kit was flatter, and opened like a note binder, with small thread loops on both sides to hold the instruments in place and quiet any noise they could make. It was a beginner's lock-pick set, with only some twenty pieces for picking the oldest and easiest locks publicly sold. Harry had heard of these kits, and only seen one, bigger and better, in the counter at the pawn shop where he did many trades. The child was happy since he had a whole chapter in his homelessness & squatting booklet about lock-picking but had never been able to practice since he had no picks. Well, that was a good find, and it also explained why this young teacher was put in Van Uttebatten by the district's bosses when he always dressed well and arrived with a meal bought at a restaurant every morning. If the guy had been stealing on the side to have the cash to purchase what he wanted to maintain his -supposed- social status, then it could explain why he wanted to be here. Nobody in this school would give a crap, as theft and fraud were probably considered clean, healthy jobs compared to what most people did inside these walls.

Walking slowly all around the office, Harry munched on one of the sugary vanilla cakes to silence his stomach and occupy his hands as he perused the 'catalog' before putting it in the pile of loot. There were a few things like the stained glass lamps that could easily fetch fifty quid each, but he could barely hold one with both hands, let alone lug the rucksack at the same time, so those stayed put. Baubles like the silver letter opened and decorative bronze desk organizer from the 1930's would leave with him. A small copper vase could fetch 15 quid, and its matched sculpted candlestick an easy 35. opening the drawers of the low dressers placed under the bank of three windows on the outside wall, Harry found an old flashlight with batteries still in the pack. The date said they were long gone, but maybe not. He opened the torch and pack, fitted the batteries and flicked the button. Bummer! The kit really was dead!

Oh well, he already had plenty here, hi hi hi!

Honestly, the rest of the office was a sheer disappointment, except for when he finally searched the long winter coat hanging on the brass hooks on the back of the door. That was the coat the teacher had worn when he arrived this morning. A brand new one, too. Harry whistled softly as he found a billfold with nearly 300 pounds and 500 Euros neatly stacked, all in 50's. In another pocket was a small zippered leather coin wallet holding some 20 pounds in small change and a plastic pillbox with four yellow caplets inside. Harry didn't know the pills, but he knew somebody who could tell him what they were, and the street worth. In another pocket was a flat leather card holder where the man had put his social security card, driver's license, teacher's union health insurance card, and a shooting club membership card. From the cardholder extended a lanyard that ended with the man's key ring; car, apartment, and a few others, including two that were identified as 'Uttebatten – teachers' and 'Uttebatten – custodians'.

Harry did a little gig of joy as he realized he had found the bloody jackpot. Firstly, he could wait until the school was truly empty since he now had proof that people other than the principal or head janitor had the keys to open the buildings. And, it was well known that the antiquated institution had never installed an electronic alarm system or cameras anywhere. With what happened to the kids, only a fuckwit of considerable ineptitude would record events in this dump! That meant the entire staff were free to come & go as they pleased, or as their illicit business was finished, regardless of the clock. Also, it meant that Harry could now leave and return all through the holidays to loot each and every room until he had a good amount of food, money and useful goodies to insure he could run off-grid if the damned CPS or bobbies wanted to blame him for the perv's well earned death.

Sitting in the comfy wheeled chair behind the desk, Harry checked the time again and came to the conclusion that he could do a little kip before packing up and moving around the desolate edifice to see what else the kids were barred from knowing. Supposedly, the school had no library but he'd heard a few teachers speak of one under their breath as they met in the bathrooms or in the yard to share a smoke. And, Harry was curious about that damned basement punishment room and what happened there. He could guess, but if he could damage or lock-out the room, maybe the bastards would stop hurting kids because they no longer had a secret lair to do it in.

It was passed 19:30pm on the clock when Harry awoke from his light nap to check out of the window to confirm he saw no cars left but that of the man he had accidentally, but happily, killed. The brand matched the ornate key-ring and logo on the actual key, so it should be it. Closing the lamps in the office and shouldering his first bag of loot, the child made sure to have the Bowie hanging in his belt and hatchet in hand before he ventured through the dark, abandoned building. With almost three solid weeks of holidays coming, the janitors and custodians had wasted no time in shuttering the building thoroughly, not caring that one or two staffers stayed behind to satiate their baser needs yet again. This cemented in Harry's mind the fact that each employee had the keys to access the school at will, and nobody would ever say anything about any weirdness they discovered come morning.

Listening to his basic wisdom for survival, Harry went down to the ground floor, to pilfer the reserves from the administrative mess hall. The moment he entered the dry pantry, the child saw how much better the quality was than for the student's mess. Instead of institution-grade bulk vats and drums, this pantry was stocked with liter or gallon sized containers with clearly labeled brands that came from Tesco or the local family grocery shop. Sneering in satisfied anger at the petty theft, he carefully selected according to his survival training; dry-pack, brined and canned, in that order. The tin of loose-leaf Earl Gray tea from Twinings quickly found a home in his pack, as did the jar of instant minestrone soup with noodles & veg already mixed in. Two large packets of Bovril beef broth cubes were grabbed, along two boxes of rice and a sack of noodles to make some variety with everything else he had at his underground home.

With his rucksack now having a problem at staying closed, Harry scrounged for another sack, finding an ancient but usable canvas shopping bag with a logo from a grocery store in a different district than where he lived. Not caring, the child carefully took several bottles of salt, pepper, ginger, cinnamon, paprika, cayenne pepper, cloves, minced garlic – onion & lemon juice mix, and a small tin of strong mustard seeds to grind and prepare to taste. The new sack allowed him to take some cans of corned beef, baked beans in gravy, and three peanut butter jars more.

In the walk-in freezer, that he stuck open with a step-stool, the child looked for easy pickings that could be carried discretely and be eaten quickly before it spoiled. He didn't have a fridge or camping cooler in his bunker, so he had to eat all the meat or fish the day he found it or lose it, unless he made the effort of brining the stuff. Which, honestly, he had tried to do, but vinegar was hard to buy in big enough quantity, as were the glass jars needed. Now however, he did have some cash so maybe he could regularize his food storage method. Thinking about it, he seized several 24-packs of frozen breakfast pork sausages, two packs of frozen ground beef and one large frozen turkey breast to eat as tonight's dinner and a midnight snack. As he moved around the cold room, Harry wondered if the people had done here as Vernon had, so he jammed his newfound Bowie in the door's hinges to keep it open while he used the step-stool to check the higher shelves for secret stashes. Bah! No luck. If there were anything important, the cooks had probably taken it home for the holidays.

With his food shopping (irony) done for the day, Harry closed the door and smiled as he saw the one thing he had wanted but been denied to date; a flashlight. The small emergency light was hung under the steel food prep table right next to the cold room's door, so the boy had not seen it when he opened the door on his way in. Flicking the switch, he smiled anew as the short, narrow beam lanced out across the low lighting of the kitchen, allowing him to search again in case he missed anything important or tradable. Being done here, the child decided to satisfy his curiosity once and for all, even if it was a very bad idea.

{ HP } --- { This is what depravity looks like } --- { HP }

Looking around the kitchen, he saw the door that led down to the basement, one of three staircases that were set into the building's frame. All three went from the deepest basement to the rooftop solarium, to facilitate escape in case of fire or some other catastrophe. Using the middle stairs was neither good nor bad, it was simply the closest before he changed his mind. Making sure the door didn't lock from in or out, he slid into the shaft and silently descended two flights to the bottom of the hellish pit that was this school. The moment he exited the stairs he felt a cold shiver pass down his back, and it seemed his senses were now wrapped in cotton wool, making his perception of events less accurate, less precise. His mind felt slightly foggy, but it dispersed after a few minutes of trying to shake his head clear. Walking out of the shaft, he saw that he was in the empty coal bunkers for the ancient water boilers that had fed heat and hot water to the school when it was still a single building, before World War II. It was public knowledge that the boilers and water plant were on the right hand of the edifice, on the parking lot's side to facilitate access to workers when the machines broke down, as well as for coal delivery, back when that was a thing. Given he had come from the kitchen, that meant he had to go left to find the damned dungeon and his answers.

Walking for a few minutes at a slow pace because he was loaded with loot, Harry eventually arrived to a a section of the foundations that was made out of dressed stone blocks rather than the poured cement and bricks the rest was made of. The corridor arrived right in front of an old oak wood door covered in iron strapping but no manner to lock it from the outside. There were no lock, eye-holes for padlock or chains, and no metal or stone supports to lodge a crossbar. The door was slightly ajar, without any light or noise coming from inside.

Taking his meager courage with both hands, the child held his flashlight in one hand and the hatchet in the other as he pushed roughly against the heavy, armored door to move it all the way into open position. What he saw at first glance was nightmarish, but not enough to inform him of what exactly the room's true purpose was. Panning the light around, he quickly found an electrical switch near the door and flicked it, illuminating the horrid chamber in the cold, artificial glow of industrial fluorescent tubes.

It really was a feudal dungeon, built as part of the first structure on the site. The floor, walls and ceiling were cut dressed stone blocks that had discolored from age and exposure to things best not imagined. three large stone fireplaces were present, one to each wall that wasn't the door where he came in. That meant that on the far outer wall, near the door to the staircase, was an hearth, as there was in the middle of the others. The chimneys had cast iron fittings to hang kettles or pots, and a metal rack of sorts to set logs on so that air flowed underneath to bolster the flames. All three hearths were cold dead, and it was a good thing. The cold air helped dim down the stench of piss, shit and vomit that came from several places around the dank, moist chamber.

On Harry's left side, the wall had an alcove shaped into the masonry wall, right next to the fireplace. It held a built-in box-bench with a hole in the top. A crude primitive toilet. On the other side of that same hearth an alcove that was obviously a washing stall of sorts showed a stone floor that had holes drilled through the blocks, but no water plumbing. On the other hand, there was a modern garden hose rolled-up around a plastic drum mounted to the wall near the outgoing staircase. A cheap plastic janitor's sink had been added right next to the hose support.

The right hand wall had a series of floating wooden shelves pegged to the walls on each side of that hearth, but nothing special in terms of structure. Likewise for the walls around the door where he stood.

That left the main floor of the chamber. This is where humanity's depravity was exposed to the naked eye of any who came here. There were four large wooden contraptions whose uses were pretty self evident. An old birching block from when the school had been a Borstal, the heavy wood and thick leather straps serving to hold a child or teenager in position while the rods, straps, canes or else were applied to the back and ass of the victim. What looked like a pommel horse for gymnastics but was in fact a whipping pony, where a child that was docile and didn't fight back against their punisher would bend over and hold-on by their own power until the beating was done. There were probably other uses too, but Harry wasn't a torturer so he didn't know them. The third device was a classic flogging triangle that you could tie the victim to in standing position, but slightly canted along the two angled face-beams of the frame. Being tied with their arms stretched over their head under tension augmented the pain of the beating while adding humiliation and powerlessness to the process, especially since the child so tied would normally be fully naked. The last device was the dreaded rack; a horizontal table with a drum-winch at each end to tie the person by the limbs and pull them apart until they broke the arms and legs off the torso. Or in this case, they could set the child face-down and beat or rape them at leisure, as it was like a very large, durable bed but without any cushions. Then again, the bastards probably thought the child's job was to be their pillow as they enacted whatever crime they enjoyed.

Harry didn't need to go look at the shelves along the walls to see they held assortments of whips, straps, canes, paddles, batons, shackles, chains, padlocks, a few old and partially used-up first-aid kits, a few mostly empty bottle of cheap booze, a cheap porcelain tea set and iron kettle, tins of tea, coffee, coco and Bovril. There was a shelf above the janitor's sink with a few almost full bottles of all-purpose household soap and generic drug store body-wash. A pair of dirty sponges and a pile of used flannel washcloths reflected moldy colors under the harsh lights from the ceiling. The odors of human waste came from the decades of unwashed misery that had crusted onto the devices and seeped into the mortar between the stone blocks of the floor. The room had apparently never been designed to handle the drainage needed when washing it out with a hose.

Small wonder, that? Harry sarcastically mused as his eyes took in the den of cruelty. So this was why so many bad teachers and admins were sent here and stayed for so long despite the horrible working conditions and miserably low pay. They had 'marginal benefits' that couldn't be found elsewhere.

Closing his eyes, the child said a prayer to the souls of those poor infant that had been dragged down here to assuage whatever pleasures the felons had dreamed of that day. From what he saw since he attended the school, not a single child here deserved to be treated like a murderer, rapist or arsonist in an adult prison. And yet, here he was, and here were those hellish devices.

Magicks and Gods are real

(Harry Potter - theme)

1986  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

Shutting the lights off, Harry was almost scared to death as he saw that several spots on the floor, torture devices and tools glowed a sickly pale whitish-blue in the dark. The phenomenon lasted for a few minutes then stopped naturally. It was as if something had absorbed the light while it was active then glowed it back, until it was adapted to the darkness anew. Not knowing what this was, or why, Harry decided to willfully ignore the event and walk back up to the ground floor.

However, that was when his entire life went to a worse Hell and back again for this one.

The antiquated torture room's door shut itself on its own power, and the whitish-blue luminescence started up again, emanating from what coalesced into strange circular drawings based upon pentacle stars, hourglasses, the sun, the moon's phase cycle, scales & weights, and a plethora of small sigils that looked like phrases or equations that Harry had seen only in cartoons or comic books about magic and faeries. Then golden lines of energy began to link all the drawings together like the web of some insane radioactive spider from the void.

Out of each sigil emerged transparent humanoid shapes that seemed to be dressed in clothing that was several centuries out of date. A few were actually wearing chain-mail hauberks covered by engraved field plate armor and great helmets. Some had pantaloons with puffy tunics and wide brimmed hats struck with many long feathers and much jewelry upon hands and necks. Others, the few women in the group, wore long flowing robes that hid everything of their shapes except their faces and hands, with shawls, veils and hand fans matching their outfits. One figure seemed the oldest of the lot, he was dressed much more simply in what appeared to be formal black trousers, button shirt, neck tie, vest and tailcoat, with a top hat bearing a golden crest on the front. The crest that was engraved above the doors of the school and printed on all its official letters and mailing envelopes. The crest of Van Uttebatten – GCVO, peer of the Britannic Realm.

The ghost floated away from the sigil that granted it shape in this reality, feeling the magic of the room and epoch as it glided slowly through the air like a collection of glittering dust motes rather than a corporeal person. The elderly features were severe, frown well in evidence on his now more defined body and face. Gazing upon the shaking small child standing near the closed doorway, the ancient village magistrate and ennobled knight raised a gloved hand to incite the boy to move towards the center of the ritual room so that they may begin the Awakening Rite.

"Come hither, yon lad." the stately alderman whispered ethereally, "We will not harm thee, in the name of Victoria my Queen do I swear, as the magick of Britannia is my guide and judge. So mote it be."

Harry's eyes were wide open, pupils dilated fully as he tried to control his fear and comprehend what he saw happening. It wasn't real! It couldn't be real! His relatives had always told him that magic and fairies were just superstitions, never real or to be believed unless he wanted to be declared mentally ill on top of being a freak and the child of drunkards.

Pointing at the honorable badges on his tailcoat chest, the magistrate explained "I am the humble owner of this ritual chamber, as it was passed through my family for more than 17 generations, as we served the Crown and Throne of Britannia. I myself am Ulyrance Van Uttebatten, the last Heir and Lord of the Van Uttebatten bloodline to have lived. I served in the land armies until I reached the rank of colonel, whence I retired to civil life and became Reader of Laws for Her Majesty's courts, earning the Bar only three years after I left the uniform. I served with distinction until I attained the function of village magistrate, upon which my poor wife died of a broken heart when our only son, a soldier as well, was killed in service. In recognition for all that my family had done, and what would disappear once I died in my turn, Dame Victoria ennobled me to the Victorian Order as Knight Grand Cross and seated me amongst the Peers of the Realm. It was, as you can see now, a mostly symbolic event. I only lived two short years after that happy ceremonial."

Harry shook his head violently, like a dog trying to dry itself while it was still raining upon it's back, to no avail. The ghostly apparitions were still all around him, and a few others now tried to speak as well, all of them related to this room and the Van Uttebatten family. "Enough! Please! Enough! I can't understand what you're all saying! I can't understand any of it! Let me go, please, just let me go... Haven't I suffered enough already?" begged the distraught child as he held his face in misery, long lines of tears running down his cheeks as he cried out his torment.

"what is the meaning of this depravity?" barked an ancient ghost dressed in the vestments of the Anglican priesthood from the 1600's, "Ulyrance! Descendant of our blood! What be the meaning of this calamity? No child should be experiencing such pain or shame inside the blessed effluves of the ritual chamber! The Awakening Rite is a holy and joyous occasion, not a time of penance and martyr!"

"Alas, my forebear, I know not what ails the boy. It has been many decades since we have last been convoked for the Awakening of a Magus unto our Laand." Floating closer to Harry's prone form, the distinguished gentleman asked kindly "Tell us child, of what ails thee so that accessing your magic gives you such tremulous emotions, rather than bombast and exultation?"

Shaking his head sideways slowly as if to deny what he was living, Harry rubbed his forearm under his nose to wipe way the snot and tears from his mouth so that he could speak without the foul taste making him puke. Not seeing the scowls his crass gesture caused, the boy simply tried to focus on the knot in the alderman's necktie so he could ignore it was a ghost that spoke to him.

"I don't know what an 'awakening' is. I was always told magic was superstition, something that poor folks and peasants came up with to explain what they couldn't. Faeries and ghosts were made up to scare people into following morality and laws, by telling them they'd suffer after death if they disobeyed their lords or priests. I was told only the insane or the drunk see spells and ghosts and demons and stuff of the sort. Fantasies and legends, but not real. Never real."

One of the genteel women floated near the prone child, looking at him kindly from behind her open fan and the thin lace veil that prudishly covered her features. "Then tell us, young one, why did you venture so deeply into the ground, down into the domain of our forebears? Did you not see the stone walls and wrought iron gates that surround the estate? Were you brought here without being told of the import of events?"

An other old man from the back of the ghostly conclave muttered mulishly "He could be one of those mudbloods that sprout up all the time, amongst the muggle hordes. Maybe he has shown signs of the Gifts and Blessings, but his family could not understand them?"

The woman near Harry shook her head sideways minutely in denial, declaring "We may have been asleep for several decades, but I can still ferret out the signs of orphan-hood, abandonment and living meagerly in the streets. These ratty clothes, calloused hands at such age, ill-kept body and uncouth mannerisms all speak loudly of a child adrift, without a beacon to guide him."

One of the knights in metal armor strode forth boldly, decreeing "Yon Lady hath the truth of the Divines in her Sight. Well known to us are her Gifts. If she declares him to be adrift, then so he is, and a Beacon to guide him we shall find. It is our sacred and sworn duty, despite that Time and society would like to forget that we had once existed. Tides of vermin and hordes of sinners shalt not see the End of our Creed in Mother Magyck, no they shalt not!"

Nodding sagely, the alderman with the top hat finally looked around the décor of the chamber, taking stock of the ancient hall for the first time since the late 1800's when it was last used. "What manner of abhorrent criminalities be this, boy? Who hath desecrated our Blessed Ritual Chamber by converting it to the Devil's workshop? Never in all my years of living have I seen any of these foul things outside of the London museums or history books about the Dark Ages and Renaissance epochs. What calamity hath befallen our estate, pray tell us!"

Shaking his head very slowly to clear it while avoiding disorientation and nausea, poor Harry was still too stumped to answer coherently. After a few minutes of respite, he began to look each entity in the eyes, making an effort to understand and memorize each person so he could try to think of what their presence meant, and how to answer them when they spoke. Trying to make an honest effort at being polite and truthful, the boy began to speak in his reedy, shaking voice. He explained what time period they were in, how the building above them was a school since a great many years in the past, and it kept being rebuilt on top of the old foundations. He confirmed the institution was named after the last Van Uttebatten, but nobody cared for that beyond that it was written in the stones of the edifices and on the stationary. Then he told them of the horrid crimes that were inflicted upon the children since the building had become a Borstal and then a public elementary school. He finished by telling them of what the teachers and admins used the room for in the last few decades. Because he had lived through too much trauma to handle alone and his mind wasn't right anymore, he told them about the attempted rape, killing and looting of the teacher and kitchen, before coming down here to validate the awful rumors. He had seen the truth and was about to leave when they emerged from... wherever they had been.

Frowning in anger and humiliation, the last Lord Van Uttebatten hung his head in shame as he wondered where his society and kingdom had gone so wrong to become this farcical caricature of what justice and orderliness were supposed to be.

As the ghostly conclave murmured their imprecations of shame and dismay, one of the youngest phantoms elocuted clearly above the din "We need the vordak to assist us! We have no bodies and can't move objects unless they were enchanted to react to ectoplasmic beings or Gifted souls like ours used to be in life. To help this child set right what has decayed, we shall need the Servant of the Creed to be our hands and senses outside these dreary walls. Call the vordak."

Again, murmurs floated amongst the group until a consensus emerged, mostly by lack of any alternative and the child's utter ignorance of anything useful in either mundane or magical life.

Addressing Harry, the Lord Van Uttebatten beckoned him kindly to stand in the middle of the room, between the four despicable tools of pain, on a faded circular engraving set in the stone floor. He guided the boy in reciting a prayer as he folded his hands over his heart and closed his eyes to focus on the intention of rousing and summoning the disappeared family's Servant from the deep sleep whence he awaited. A loud grinding of stone upon stone was heard as the back of the washing alcove near the left-side chimney pulled back sideways into the wall opposite the hearth to reveal a black masonry tunnel with stone stairs. Soon enough, a hushed whisper of clothes dragging along the stone floors and stairs beneath came hauntingly towards Harry's senses, making him wonder why exactly he had accepted to say the prayer to call the Servant upstairs.

When the figure emerged from the tunnel, Harry dropped to his knees in miserable fear of the horror he had awakened unto the mortal world. It was a floating beast, a shape from nightmares that the child would never forget. Hovering about three feet above the floors, covered in faded but rich vestments that reminded strongly of Anglican clergymen of high rank, wearing an abbatial mitre hat and holding in its clawed right hand a long wooden staff topped with a golden abbatial crosier, and a cast iron funeral urn in the left hand. From under the low brim of the mitre gazed out the empty, literally empty holes, of the floating undead skeleton as it peered at the child that dared summon it, with the indolence of those for whom power was as easy as thought.

As the trembling, miserable child thought his mind would give out its last whimper, the eldritch entity moved the clawed index of its right hand, aiming it at his face, incanting "Gaia mater, puer purus in insanitum dolorificat. Invocatum geos esspiritum sancti. Puer purificatum et sanitatum non tenebrans. Cruore sancti ut esspiritu benefactum. Ameno Gaia mater."

(Translation from elden Latin; "Mother Gaia, this pure child suffers an ill mind. I invoke the Blessed Spirit of the Earth. This child be purified and his mind repel the dark sleep. Blood be blessed and soul benefit of health. Mother Gaia, amen.")

Flowing from the undead thing's finger came a beam of hallowed golden light that bathed Harry in soft, benevolent healing effluvium gifted by Gaia, the Mother Earth, the Vessel of All Life, as she accepted to restore the poor, victimized orphan unto a state closer to the good health and stable sanity than what his menial existence had permitted him to have. As the prayer's effect ended, the child fell into a light sleep that allowed the floating creation of magicks and Faiths to inspect the Ritual Chamber and, amusingly, it so occurred that, yes, a magically enchanted skull can in fact move enough to form a full frown on its brow. Will wonders never cease? (sarcasm)

{ HP } --- { Meeting Dryskholl and learning the truths } --- { HP }

It was nearing 23:00pm on the last Friday of school when poor little Harry came back to his senses from the accidental but deep and helpful slumber he had experienced.

The six year old yawned widely as he mumbled silently "Man! What a dream... Floating skeletons and ghosts that talk... And spells in Latin... Lucky for me I don't live with the Dursley's full-time anymore or I'd get thrashed right & proper for dreaming that cold shite up."

Opening his eyes, he was surprised to see far more light than normal for his cupboard under the stairs, or his underground bunker. In fact, this light was whitish-blue instead of what aunt Petunia's cheap bulbs produce or the lively reddish flames of his stove and oil lamp. Sitting up from where he was laid out, the boy quickly realized he was not in simple Little Whining in Surrey, south of London, anymore.

He was resting on a sturdy wooden bed frame piled high with blankets and cushions that had kept him toasty in the rather hot chamber's atmosphere as the three monumental fireplaces we lit, the burning logs of pine, oak and cherry giving off an embalming smell that roused the senses. His position was along the wall where he had entered the dreaded room, earlier in the evening, but the shelves had been removed and the strange bed put in place for his use. All the torture and punishment devices were gone, as were the shelves and all electrical fixtures, but the water plumbing had been kept, if modified slightly. Above all else, the stonework around the chamber had been completely cleaned and the odd luminescent drawings renewed by some artifice Harry had no earthly idea how.

Confirming that his weird dream had not in fact been a dream at all, he could see that the stone doorway to the lower level was still opened, and the floating horror was hovering around the room, occasionally mumbling or praying in tongues that Harry didn't think had been invented for humans to speak or know about. Thankfully, the skeleton had its back towards the boy, so he was able to center his mind and senses before facing THAT thing again.

Then Harry became aware that all the ghosts were still present, but clustered together on one side, along the right-hand wall where the loose shelves used to be, with the undead priest floating indolently in the middle of the room. But Harry could hear some noises that were not what he remembered from either the apparitions or their 'Servant' whom he had awakened. What was going on here?

Suddenly, an excited squeaky voice exclaimed happily "Master Harry Potter is waking! We's finally be able to tell him about magic! The House of Potter can be free again! Bad master Whiskers' plans gonna feed them pigs, now!"

Whatever made that sound for a voice was -very- excited at the prospect of Harry being alive and well, and obviously wanted to help him somehow. The problem was that the boy had seen and lived so much bloody shite recently that he just couldn't believe anything at face value anymore. Plus, those street-life survival manuals had explained at length what desperate people will do to stay fed & warm, and what criminals or perverts were willing to pay or threaten to make those poor unfortunates cooperate. Not to mention the corrupt cops and officials on the take. Harry was clearly outnumbered, outclassed, out-equipped, and now he had to admit he was out-magicked on top of everything else. That wasn't something he had thought to judge about himself today when he left for the last school day before hols.

The Vordak Lord floated aside, giving Harry a clear view of the small being that was sitting on a small wooden chair that was as deeply padded and comfortable as the bed he sat on. The creature was surprisingly shorter than Harry, barely reaching 2 feet and 6 inches of height when it stood from the chair. For one fleeting second, the boy was inordinately gladdened to be bigger than somebody in this room, even though he guessed that it could still harm him easily, given that it seemed to take the flying dead priest's presence like the English accept rain all year long. On closer inspection, the diminutive entity had greenish skin that sported random brown splotches that made Harry's heart heavy. The boy had lived a hard life, and he could guess that those bruises were a sign of some disease the being was too poor or alone to find a cure. After that, the child saw the actual features; large bulbous eyes, long crooked nose, wide bat-like ears, and long agile fingers. The small humanoid was dressed in what were clearly infant sized rags discarded by humans, as they fit on it like Harry's own clothes poorly fit himself.

The raspy voice of the dead priest's ethereal whisper loudly around the chamber as he gestured comically with his left hand, the cast iron funeral urn clutched tightly by the short stem under the sculpted bowl.

"Master Harold Jamieson Evans Potter, Heir of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Potter, Heir Presumptive of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, Heir of the Most Venerable and Greatly Spiritual House of Peverell, na-Earl of Claymoors of the Scottish Lowlands, Peer of the Britannic Realms, Arch-Lord of Gaia and faithful anti-Champion of the Lord Hades, God of Death, Judge – Arbiter of The Beyond, and Guardian of the Grand Gate of Reality. Well met at last, High Lord Potter."

As the dead holy man bowed from the waist towards him, Harry almost lost awareness again. Eyes wide in surprise and mouth agog in stupor, the poor child was wondering if being dead had affected the old priest's sanity, or if the fungi in the old dungeon had gotten to the spells that kept it afloat. Then he winced at his own presumptuous imbecility since he knew nothing about any magicks to judge this mess, and knew even less about the beings in the room to judge if they were normal or healthy in any ways.

"Master Harry was never told by poor muggles who he be. The bad master Whiskers had potioned and spelled them to never say it. Besides, they never knew of it. Aunty horse-face and uncle walrus-man never bothered to find out, even before they gots cursey mail from Dumbledore." came angrily from the small green being. "Then again, they already hated magic and were bigoted for a long time before. Bad master Whiskers not chose them without reasons." the small shy creature completed as a quiet afterthought.

Humming in agreement, the hovering unliving priest beckoned Harry with his right hand, the clawed fingers moving dexterously around the haft of the staff that it also still kept a tight hold of. "Come and sit with us, child. You should not be so afraid of our conclave. We shalt not harm thee, not on this august night of your Awakening."

Deciding he had nothing else to do anyways, the weak, tired and despondent boy stood from the bed and walked towards the chair that had obviously been put in place for him, since it was twice larger than where the small foreigner sat. As he approached, Harry could see that all the ghosts were more solid than before, their features almost as defined as if they were flesh, although most women wore veils or hid behind hand-fans prudishly. The small green entity squeaked excitedly as it bounced to its feet to fluff and place his chair's cushions before he sat down, looking at him with an utterly disconcerting expression of beatitude on its pale, skinny face.

With the small green being sitting anew, the hovering skeleton spoke "The presentation I have said earlier is your full name, clanic affiliation, titles, and spiritual Creed. It is true that these may change during the course of a person's life, for some willingly discard family or title to retire in religious abbeys to finish their life far removed from the troubles of society. Others were born in such poverty they had never even the chance of clan or family, such that only a single simplistic name is used. In worse cases, the courts may order that a being or bloodline be struck from the books of their Nation or Congregation, making it magically impossible for any within their borders to speak or write the accursed name again until the sanction is lifted. As for being oathed to the clergy of any Faith, that also has yet to be enacted. What my Shen Power Sight dweomer has revealed of your Soul is not guaranteed, nor is it immuable amongst the Stars. Your life and experiences will determine where you walk, and what acclaims you attain."

Shaking his head slowly in denial, Harry replied with the certitude of the ignorant who had that state of affairs beaten and spelled into them all their life; "I'm not that person. I don't know who you think I am, but I'm nobody important. My parents weren't even important, since they were just drunkards who died in a car accident they caused. They were drinking again, so dad didn't have the reflexes to avoid the lorry that came out of the fabric's lot, so he rammed into them. The petrol tank exploded and they died, along with the two employees in the truck's cabin. They left nothing behind. No house, no money, no nothing but debts and pain and me. And I'm nothing. That's pretty well known, given how every adult I ever met always told me to my face."

In a strange twist of events that poor Harry was unable to understand, the skeleton's face seemed to loose some of its severity while the small green being at his side began to practically vibrate in outrage, its all-encompassing wrath etched so plainly on its alien features that even the child could interpret what it was, just not what it meant. Harry was too emotionally stunted and repressed to have much social or mental skills, so it was up to the conclave to help him through.

"Master Harry Potter bees most certainly NOT nothing! These bees LIES from the wands and bottles of bad master Whiskers! Curses on your head, he put! Made your family hate you! Cut all your bonds to the bloodline and servants! Criminal and traitor, he is! Not you! You is not bad! You is most certainly NOT nothing to people who knows yous!" the small creature bellowed in a spastic fit of distemper that caused it to suddenly bend over to cough out blood.

The ghost of old Lord Ulyrance Van Uttebatten floated forth, casting a spell silently from his bare hand upon the diseased creature. Shaking his head sadly, the alderman explained "It is as we had feared. His former master has poisoned the Bond itself, making his death unavoidable. He has but a few short days left, but he will not live past Friday of next week, at most. I am deeply aggrieved, friend elf, that you would come to such a depraved end. Your noble service deserves better acknowledgment than such turpitude."

Harry asked softly, fearful that he was beginning to understand what was being said around him for the first time in the entire situation; "What is happening? Why is he dying? Could he be saved? Can I do anything to help him?"

Replying with great kindness, a portly noble Lady ghost explained for him. "Nay child, no one can stop the progression of the foul curse that afflicts the house-elf anymore. If we had caught it months ago, when it was enacted, then mayhaps... But not now. As for the problem, that is simple to explain. This being is named 'Dryskholl', and he is a member of the race 'house-elf' which are a part of the larger elven species group. They are, to date and our knowledge, the only artificially created race of elves. In the long distant past, a cruel human saw the fey beauty, grace and magicks of the elvish peoples as a threat to his own magnificence. As is the course of such bigotries, he was too weak and too cowardly to challenge those noble elves directly in combat or even debate, as his mind was not as sharp or agile as theirs. So he fomented a solution as base and crass as his bigotry; he would use alchemy to create an entire race of 'elves' whose sole reason to exist would be to serve his menial needs as maids, valets and workmen on his estate."

Floating forward to pass a gentle hand upon the brow of the suffering elf, the elder noble woman continued; "Given how limited his own actively cast magicks were, and how afraid of combat he truly was, the hedge-wizard designed his 'elves' to not have an internal core to hold or generate magick the way that most naturally living entities do. Instead, he created a perversion of the Blood Law spells that permit to blood-adopt a stranger of any age into the clanhold, thus mixing the magicks of the group and individual to bolster all. This would have the double effect of making the creatures wholly dependent upon wizards giving them magic from their own cores to feed them, but also tether them to the physical estate and spiritual membership of the House, so that the burden of feeding and controlling the entities would not stay upon a single human who could wilt and implode under such stresses. Given that he was truly a weakling, this point was of some particular interest for the felon alchemist. That, plus the fact that slavers rarely want to expend much energy or mind-power on controlling what they see as machines made of flesh whose sole purpose is to make them rich, comfortable, and powerful without efforts from them."

The Vordak Lord ended the explanation "And so it is that for several millenia, the house-elves have served the greatest, noblest wizarding clans and families of Europa, the Slavic lands and immediately around the Mediterranean Sea's shorelines. Occasionally, when a place has enough natural magick emanating from the Ley Lines or from devout worship of the Living Gods, then house-elves can gather at this locale and live in relative freedom. Although, like the much vaunted wizard school Hogwarts, the owners of such places are usually quick to demand that the elves bond with their organization, be it school, church or guildhall. In all times and places, the magical capacities of house-elves have been quite impressive, and so they are always seen as a symbol of a group's raw magical potential, wealth and social status. And, while few would admit it aloud, they are superb magical combatants who will defend their homes most valiantly, and much more faithfully than the average human hireling, too."

Dryskholl nodded weakly, as he was recovering from his coughing fit very slowly. "Aye, master Harry Potter, sir. We house-elves have been scorned for our appearances, but sought for our Talents and Gifts since our race was given breath. This led to wizards trading or buying us like cattle, or sentient tools. Sometimes wees were exchanged for a good marriage contract, or given as payment of debts or bets. A few cowards even paid for their lives out of Honor Duels by offering their elf as Blood Tithe to close the contest without violence. In a few cases, jealous neighbors would attack and kill a family to steal their elves, then force the Bond of service to form with them. If the elves refused, they lost their magick rapidly until death, but sometimes the murderers would kill them anyways, to be sure. For thousands of years, we house-elves have served with as much honor as we could, oftentimes despite the evils our masters did, or forced us to do in their names."

Thinking hard, Harry asked gently "Is that why you're dying? Because the bad master Whiskers made you do things that were shameful and you refused? Or you did the opposite? You said something about spells and potions in my family... Did somebody poison us to be this way?"

Nodding weakly, poor Dryskholl confirmed the facts aloud. "Yes, master Harry. The bad wizard took you from house, when big bad Dark Lord kill your parents. He put curses and potions inside of you at Hogwarts. Then, he went to your kin to do the same to them. He bound the lot with charmed letters he sent every year to inject his will into the spells to keep them active. Magicks need three things to be; knowledge of what you want, intention and emotion. When a spell or potion is used, you can make it last longer by feeding it intention or emotions over time, otherwise it will lapse shortly. Very few things be eternal in magicks or Nature. Only elemental spells and alchemy make permanent things."

The young boy wondered aloud "So my relatives hate me because they were drugged, and their minds were altered to fit whatever this bad master wanted. That could explain a lot. But how was he able to force you? And what did you do that was so shameful?" he asked suspiciously.

Dryskholl shivered despite the warmth of the stone hall, wrapping one of the thin sheets around his diminutive frame. Taking the time to order his thoughts, the poor elf was well besides himself with emotions that were conflicting badly. First, he got to tell the young master about magic many years before the bad master Whiskers had planned. But it opened the poor elf's eyes to just how bad the child had suffered when the elf thought he was safe at school, away from the Dursley's hatred. Then again, the fact the child had discovered an old Ritual chamber where the hallowed ancestors still dwelt was a minor miracle of Mystra in itself, and could compensate for a lot of things.

In a squeaky voice that betrayed his tiredness, the sickly house-elf explained at great length all that he knew about Albus Dumbledore and his many positions, the 'prophecy' that the old idiot referred to each time he wanted to justify his acts, and the many evils he had perpetrated upon an entire community for a century, since World War I began in 1914 to be precise. Then Dryskholl explained how he had been born sick, how his first humans had rejected him, and how he had been reduced to seeking shelter in Hogwarts to survive. That was how Dumbledore managed to usurp the Bond with the school to force the very young and sick elfling to do his unholy bidding. For almost six years now, the servant had seen, heard and assisted Albus with his foul schemes, including popping to ill-defended houses to pour poisons into the food of sleeping wizards who wanted to think and live differently than Dumbledore wanted them to do. The man was a terrifyingly clever alchemist who used potions to change behaviors or anchor curses to living entities so that they would follow their unseen master's will.

Prompted by a few slowly spoken questions from Harry, the Vordak or the ghosts, the poor elfling gave them details about Dumbledore's true character, feeble body, and fear of changes or independent opinions. In many ways, the old man was very much the mirror-image of the bad wizard who had created his race, so long ago. He certainly believed that all species other than human were inferior, made to serve humanity or be used as potion components and sacrifices for rituals. Likewise, he publicly preached tolerance and friendship with muggles, the non-magical humans, but in reality he considered them barely fit to use as whores and theater performers, or also for sacrificial rituals. Albus Dumbledore may be afraid of pain and injuries to himself to the point of avoiding all fights, but he certainly never shied away from killing or maiming when it kept him in political power, or magically superior to all he surveyed. He just stole money from somebody to pay another to do the deed for him, unless there was a need for secrecy. Albus had indeed killed, maimed, handicapped, mind-raped and mentally programmed hundreds by his own wand over the decades since he sat his OWL tests, just as World War I was being started. On top of everything else, the wizened crone was incredibly good at bullshitting people, hiding his true nature under that kooky, goodly grand-father persona he affected. All species instinctively fear less those beings they believe to be slightly less stable or sane than the cultural norm of the day, so Albus used that to appear harmless by playing the fool in public assemblies. Until he was challenged face-to-face, in which case he did have a formidable repertoire of occult and esoteric lore to call upon, but no real fighting experience or skills to speak of. If he saw that you were gearing up to defy him, he would either curse you to compliance, or hire an assassin to end you silently before your challenge was spoken aloud. He only attacked from behind, or when the target was asleep, to avoid his ambush turning into an all-out fight that he could perhaps lose.

Harry sat in silence, trying to absorb what he had been told by the many fantastic beings that he had never thought he would one day encounter. The most amazing thing was that unlike the legends, these ghosts and skeleton weren't interested in hurting him or enslaving him in a pit like a stupid pig who could only be fattened for slaughter. And the 'house-elf' explained so much, but also served as such a dire warning of things that were already wrong...

Looking towards the hovering undead priest, Harry asked politely "I apologize for my manners good sir. You have apparently healed me and are trying to help my situation more than any adult ever has before, but I still haven't heard your name. Is 'Vordak' your identity or a title? And could you explain -what- you are, please? I never heard legends about floating skeletons before."

An odd windy chuckle emanated from the undead cleric as his shoulders seemed to shiver minutely under his thick ceremonial vestments. Gazing fondly upon the orphaned boy, he answered in his raspy voice with great detail.

"The word 'vordak' refers to the type of skeletal undead that I am. Unlike zombies, inferi and shamblers which are types of the same thing, but with different powers. A vordak can be lesser, normal or higher strength, and myself have been activated as 'higher vordak' when the rituals were enacted. I am styled 'Vordak Lord' because my mind is fully unfettered from any commands or physical focus point. I can move about, think and do whichever I wish, so long as I respect and abide the Creed to which I have willingly oathed. This means that my Gods have not abandoned me when I became undead, they simply have different expectations and goals than when I was alive. A skeleton has no flesh, nerves or veins, therefore I do not eat or drink, my body never tires but my mind does, and my core can be depleted so much that I must sleep to recharge. I feel no physical pains, but again mentally and spiritually I still feel things like pride, sense of duty and shame. The capacities of a Vordak are the same regardless of its power type at activation, they are just more energetic. As is evident, we hover, float and fly at will with quite a bit of speed and agility, even in the worse weather. We have the capacity to see life-force, soul, and negative energy as clearly as colors, although it is rather short ranged to a few hundred feet. We can sense the odor of blood as well as a hound, and thus know if a person is diseased or drugged upon contact. We can use certain spells that are reserved for Vordak only, which are programmed into our mind during creation. Other than that, we also have much greater strength, equal to five men, and are immune to illusion spells or effects except for a few specialized dweomers that were invented to fool undead."

Taking a pause as if he were a breathing man needing it, the floating cadaver proclaimed "I am to this day His Excellence, Sir Grahaut Gloutnay, Lord of the minor House Dhennack, cadet branch of Van Uttebatten, Bishop of Mystra, Mother of All Magycks, Abbot of Brutnor Abbey, and father confessor for the Elder and Noble House of Van Uttebatten. I am indeed most honored that you would be the man to rouse me from slumber, Heir Potter. You see, one of your ancestors was present during my transition to undeath, something I remember fondly despite the many centuries. It was a Dasmater Potter, a specialist Darkes enchanter from a distaff branch of your House that granted us his wisdom of things occult and macabre to accomplish the higher necromancies needed to fulfill the wishes of my patron goddess. While not a necromancer or follower of Hades or Necros, he had impressed me as quite adept in his trades and crafts. A good man, with a good wife and two well endowed daughters, as I recall. Alas, I never saw him again in this world, and have nothing further to give you of him. Your family was always much more ennobled than either mine House or that of my patrons, so that only my stature as Bishop and Abbot would have justified our kin congregating at social events or rituals."

Frowning in worry, Harry asked fearfully "Are you saying that my family were snobs or looked down on others because of money? Because that's not what I am or how I act. Oh, and by the way, I am pleased to meet you formally, Father Abbot Gloutnay. I hope our visit leaves you well and satisfied your time and the blessings of your goddess were well spent."

An amused feminine little giggle sounded from the side of the room where the ghosts floated in silent witness, gladly absorbing the simple innocence and light of life that pulsed from the child, despite how damaged his body, mind, magick and soul were. One of the youngest phantoms moved forward, stowing her hand-fan in a purse so she could lift her veil to bestow her appearance upon Harry during conversation.

"My but he learns quickly, for being such little rapscallion! You'll be having your hands full, my Lord Bishop Gloutnay, if you intend what I suspect. Not that I disapprove in the least. Our noble house has fallen to Time and the churlishness of curs, but our sense of duty and oaths have not. If you plan to apprentice the lad, then our Blood shall bless this with pride. One last feat of arms at the foot of the Throne of England, for the Crown and Faiths of our blessed Laands."

{ HP } --- { Speeches of duty and sacrifice } --- { HP }

The Vordak raised the index of his left hand, signaling for silence as he responded to his masters, in this life and the next. "I cannot apprentice yon boy, though it grieves me to abandon him to the eddies of knavery that sweep the Nation. Unfortunately for us all, our friend Dryskholl is not the only one who has been fatally wounded. I have scanned the estate and found that over the last century, all the manatite pillars and wardstones have been removed from the Laand. If the stones were still inside the Laand, they would still emit their waves of energy towards my crypt and I would have endured properly. Alas, without them fueling my magick, even the Divine powers from my Faith will not suffice to maintain my existence. My station is to serve as Steward and Guardian of the House of Van Uttebatten; if the House is destroyed, then there is no reason to reward the servant who failed to protect them. This was programmed into my magic during my elevation into undeath, and there are no mortal means to change this. If Master Potter had fully awakened his powers and progressed through the Creed of his Faiths, then maybe he could command such necromancies or Miracles of Hades as to grant me reprieve, or bind me to his House instead. But not now, not with what is left of us. All of us, you know this well, are not long for this world anymore."

The old Lord Van Uttebatten nodded sadly, confirming "I had not brought up the subject, for I yet hoped a solution could be found. Alas, with the estate ruined into extinction, none of our tomes or artifacts remain. Not that it would guarantee success, with how perverted the very seat of our Blood had become in a few short decades of absence. If the fools turned our beloved ritual chamber into a butcher's shed to harm children, then I shudder to think of what evil uses our heirlooms and volumes have been tasked."

"Dryskholl can help!" the elf exclaimed,surprising everyone. "I bees dying anyways. I could give magic and life to the Lofty Abbot so that he can float more long. He can educate Master Harry much better than Dryskholl could. That could work easy-peasy!" the elf said, completely at ease with offering himself as a sacrifice for this noble end.

Shaking his head negatively, the Vordak Abbot countered firmly but with great kindness "Nay, my young friend, you shalt not. It is I who shall pass magick and life unto thee, so that you may accompany young Harold further. I have but three fortnights of existence left, but if sacrificed willingly in the correct method, you would live to see him through to the end of his school year, and mayhaps the summer vacations. On the reverse, if you give your life to me, I will gain but one or two weeks of existence but be so weak and powerless that I would be bedridden and unable to use any magic at all, for fear of emptying my core on one casting. The benefits of you being alive are that you will last far longer, and are already acclimated to the culture and mores of the epoch, which I am not and have no time to correct. For young Harold's sake, please accept my offer. I know it goes against the nature of your kind to let others sacrifice themselves when you are designed and created for such events, but in this foul situation, the greatest benefit will be thus."

The small elfling looked deeply into the empty eye sockets of the hallowed undead, gazing into unfathomable depths of magic, wisdom and experiences that no ordinary being could grasp. He nodded his head slowly, thinking about a few things as he formulated a reply. "Dryskholl be of the opinion that nothing wees be doing can change this anymore. Yous all and me be walking to the Great Gate before Master Harry be 7 years old. My heart bees knowing this. Even if the Bond wasn't poisoned by bad master Whiskers, I had been sick from birth. Nothing can heal that. But, yous must be helping Master Harry with his Awakening Rite, and try to break the curses and evil potions on him before we make the Pledge."

The skeleton and ghosts all nodded at the elf's wisdom. His kind had no affinity for the higher spiritual rites needed for an Awakening, and the ghosts could speak guidance but not actually help beyond verbal tutoring. Only the Vordak had both solid body and the types of erudition needed to coach the boy through the ceremony. It was quickly agreed that Harry would undergo the Awakening then, upon rousing from the healing sleep that followed such events, they would purge and cure him from as many of the curses and elixirs as they could safely counter. After that, the child would serve as Binder for the Pledge between Bishop Gloutnay and Dryskholl, to be followed by his accepting the elfling into Bond with House Potter directly. Everything else would be decided after the results of these ritualized events were known.

{ HP } --- { Some histories of the magical cultures and sects } --- { HP }

It was passed one in the morning when the floating skeleton known as Bishop Gloutnay had finished preparing the chamber for the Awakening Rite that would see little Harry Potter touch his magical core for the first time in his life. It was also the time to give the child a cursory class on the many schools of sorcery, alchemy, mentalism, psionics and Divine Faiths that held sway across the many Laands of Earth.

Firstly, Harry was told quite clearly that Albus Dumbledore's grandstanding and hubris about being the Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Warlocks was a heaping load of tosh. Firstly, Hogwarts school and the so-called Ministry of Magic were in fact nothing but a small sectarian grouping who were better known by the appellation 'Welsh Wiccan' due to the fact that the Wizengamot was founded by Welsh witches in late 800 on the humans' current calendar, and Hogwarts was built by that cult near the year 1,000. The group was so damned small that they had only one government building, one hospital, the castle-school and one mediocre, retrograde village that never evolved with the times. In essence, the self-styled Britannic Wizarding World was a religious & racial sect that had denied its feminine Faith roots to concentrate mostly on male-dominated sorcerous guilds and professions. This meant that the much vaunted ICW served only as the gathering of other European wizardry sects who followed a similar Creed, and it was obvious that their cultures and populations were similarly limited. Dumbledore's fiefdom held barely ten thousand souls spread across all of Britannia, Scotland and Ireland, while the ICW reached around 400,000 souls with its laws and cultural norms.

Even then, the British Ministry of Magic was never recognized by the Crown & Throne of the Nation as having any legal authority whatsoever. The fact that they arrested, jailed and even executed people routinely was quite a consternation for the ghostly host. As a religious movement they were supposed to be regarded in the same light as the Anglican, Catholic or Protestant segments of Christianity. They were to be subject to the Laws of the Land in all things, enacting only those exceptions granted by the Crown. This information made Harry well aware that he'd have to be real careful about these dishonest bastards, especially when Dryskholl explained about the Ministry's Trace charm that was placed on all wands bought from a master crafter, and the sensor crystals that dotted the country. It was especially galling to hear that Dumbledore had bribed and potioned workers to steal ward crystals from that semi-government to place a siege line of detectors around his household without having the legal right to do it.

This revelation however caused the deathly priest to laugh hollowly before he detailed why he thought it a great joke upon the man himself. "It is obvious now that this Albus has no experience with wards that need an actual master warder to enact. If he had studied the craft to its full extent, he would know better than to try this idiocy, that even the mundanes would realize was faulty in logic and execution. He set his detection array in a circle around a focal point that was to be the center of all attention, but that was the worse error possible. The Trace existed already, back in my days of flesh life. It was not, however, used to track children doing magic out of school or home, nor 'forbidden' spells. The very nature of the crystals used makes them unsuited for focalized emissions of power; they are passive receptors only. They were made like scrying mirrors but not attuned to a single source, so they could receive a standard pulse of magic that served as a coded distress call so that the community would be warned of impending danger, thus would send help at a useful pace."

Making an illusionary map of the county appear in thin air, the fleshless Bishop continued; "Behold how closely clustered the detectors are! Thinking to insure there were no holes in his grid, the inept buffoon had the devices placed so close that each is capable of sensing its two nearest neighbors on each side of the interception line. That means that the sensing elements are always saturated by the energies emitted from their counter-parts to the point they have no capacity to perceive anything else, unless it is cast actively at the crystal with deliberate strength of intent and emotions. Plus, the detection grid circle is so wide that it encompasses the entire county, because the knave didn't want to get a 'runaway alert' every time the boy moved to stores, school or hospital as that would waste his time on worthless investigations. The siege line is so wide that the child could lose himself amongst thousands of buildings, water pipes, sewage tunnels or warfare catacombs and the sensors wouldn't see a difference. In fact, young Harry has been living mostly in the streets and in a cement bunker for weeks already, and the cretinous felon has never become aware of it at all! And such is the proof that, by disnaturing the Trace sensor crystals in this manner, that he no-doubt thought quite clever, the old fool actually defeated his own machinations rather spectacularly!"

Several ghosts were in gleeful agreement with the holy man's deduction, going so far as to add that Dumbledore was clearly a man that had little contact with reality outside of his castle, and even less out of his sectarian group. Only sheer ignorance of basic principles of energy, magic, physics and networking artifacts together could explain such a failure of planning and crafting.

Then Bishop Gloutnay began to explain about the many other sects or guilds that tried to declare they were the true Government for Magical Humanity, most specifically for Europeans. As he never studied the lores and societies of Arabia, Africa, the mythical Far East or the -recently- discovered southern portion of The New World, the Americas, he could only give a succinct and focused discourse. While his list was not all-encompassing nor complete, it did give the young boy much matter to think about in the coming weeks.

There was the White Council (of occultism) located in Edinburgh Castle, in Scotland' capital of the same name. They were the oldest, richest, most numerous group in activity, and the most well equipped with several libraries and vaults across the planet. They had started in Alexandria, then moved to Carthage, followed by the Vatican in Rome, then Istanbul (Constantinople) and Madrid, to end up in there current location, in the vast tunnels beneath Edinburgh since 1499. The White Council had a militia of 'Wardens' that were tasked with hunting down and killing anybody who breached their inflexible Roman and Christian inspired 'Laws of Magicks'. This group is actually part sorcery and part Faith as they officially follow the Biblical tenets and have a small group of actual Angels forming a caste above the Senior Council. However, it is well known that Jesus and the majority of his loyal Angels have died nearly 900 years back, leaving only memories and hopes hidden in a few still active artifacts or relics that allow for prayers from the truly faithful to be enacted. It is in fact the White Council that demanded and enforced the 'Statute of Secrecy' passed in the year 1500AD, not the ICW or any other group. Most believe it was a result of the beginning of the Inquisition, but in reality it was because the Council realized that they could police, and even tyrannize, their wide-spread group of practitioners much better without always having to wait for a local sheriff or judge to permit their actions. By having a blanket veil of secrecy, whomever they hunt and victimize cannot appeal to a higher court, and other Faiths or Powers have almost no bearings on their decisions, which is the true goal. To protect those mages and warlocks that reach positions on the Senior Council to rule over their varied kindred of ALL spell-users, not just sorcery or alchemy, unlike the Wizengamots.

There was the Council of Dark Watchers, located under the British Museum in London. This group was intensely private and rejected the authority of anyone but the British Crown, whom they claimed to serve under a Royal Writ. They trained and tasked 'Slayers' to destroy undead, Lycan and Changelings who threaten the peace of the mundane world. Being focused on training muggles to battle magical entities has garnered this group many enemies amongst the other sects, and very few supporters on the mundane side, even from the British nobility or government. Like the White Council, they are hermetical, self-centered, and think they are the penultimate law of wherever they are conducting one of their brutal interventions. With these persons, the best courses of action are either active retreat or a fatal ambush, not wasting time in parley as they would use that delay to set-up their own attacks.

There was the Librarians of Venerable Antiquity, who had begun in Cairo – Egypt, until they moved their base in Cambridge - UK in the early 1700's, which lasted until WW-II when they were bombed out, so they moved their leadership to the USA in Washington DC. This group was relatively passive and non-violent, focused on hunting devices & artifacts that were dangerous or being misused, but they almost never entered combat against a living being. On the flip side, they were quite ready to sell copies of their books, scrolls and photos of artifacts to those whose Creed aligned with their own. One common opinion shared by governments and churches was that they were in reality a glorified Guild of tomb robbers in the job for thrills and money.

There was the Grimm Paranormal Hunters Guild, begun in Kiev - Ukraine, then moved to Prague – Czechoslovakia, then going to Manchester - UK, then moved to Dublin – Ireland, until they finally settled in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. This group was Founded by the legendary Grimm Clan who had specialized in occultism, paganism, witchcraft, Faith-magic, alchemy and exorcism for nearly a millenia. Tightly associated with the Eastern Orthodox Christian movement, these hunters have slowly lost a great deal of their religious bases to concentrate on the newer mundane weapons, and developing alchemy in a combat-support role. They hunted pretty much anything that was deemed 'supernatural' or 'otherworldly' but under the caveat that the entity or device had to have proven harmful. They were not mercenaries and did not commit contracts to kill or banish beings that harmed no one, regardless of how weird they were.

There were the ancestral Druidic Covens that emerged from the Germanic and Celtic traditions, spread around all of Europa, Slavia and Britannia. These covens specialized in summoning the elementals and spirits that made the Mystical Laands livable and stable. They also were the primary source of naturally magical plants and animals to be used as food or building materials throughout the known world. In fact, Druidism was usually such a benevolent, communal Faith and Creed that few governments had any trouble letting them set-up inside their borders. The problems came from other religious systems, like Christians and Muslims whose Creed commanded the forcible conversion of infidels, or their deaths in Holy War. This proved to be a bad choice since druids are quite adept at riding wild animals much better than armored knights, and they have a large choice of survival and combat prayers that unleash Nature's fury on the fools that trespass their Sacred Glades. Massive storms, floods, forest fires, earthquakes, plant-life that animates & rock formations that become alive to fight the invaders were all basic tactics of the Druids to defend their communities. In the last three centuries since the discovery of America by the Spaniards, many Druidic covens have relocated to the immense wilderness of that continent, especially the north of Canada and the central mid-west of the USA. Amusingly, the druids and witches moved on the boats and convoys of christian pilgrims, leaving them once they had arrived at their way-point where they would meet others of their sect for the final road.

There was the Sororitam Naturam Pieta Ordum matriarchal coven of witches, one of the biggest and richest female-led organizations that either mundanes or magicals had ever seen come to pass. This ancient society was created at an epoch whence even Clanholds were not fully developed as a means of controlling territory and population. These women were a mix of mundanes, squibs, semi-spell-users and full casters that worked, prayed, and lived for the good of their families and farming villages. They were the first attempt at civilization and social order that transcended the barriers of Blood, politics, wealth, magic and Faith Creed to increase the chances of survival against the harsh weather, animals and roving bandits. But their socialistic, egalitarian mindset rapidly rubbed churches and monarchs the wrong way, leading to most of the early nation-states banning the existence of the Order. In fact, many scholars believe that the paranoid mania of the Christian Inquisition against witches was only a political war to destroy the Green Sisterhood rather than really find Devil worshipers or others who had strayed from their Biblical Creed. In any case, the collapse of the Sororitam in the late 1500's under the ceaseless waves of assault is well known in the magical population, and that was the reason that hedge-craft became so undervalued, especially by male wizards and clerics. However, it is also well know that a group of surviving Sisters fled to the New World where they merged with Druids who had the same idea, thus founding joint communities of Paganism, Witchery, Druidism and hedge-crafting that should now be thriving peacefully.

There was the Freemason Faithful Guild, which was never derived from nor associated with the ill-fated Templar Knights, whom never bothered with witches and wizards, unless it was to hunt them on a warrant from the Inquisition. The Freemasons were in fact the first truly organized and powerful union (or syndicate) of professional tradesman & craftsmen to be acknowledged by the national governments and churches of Europe and the Slavic lands. They were initially founded by carpenters who specialized in the building of boats and bridges, but there were so many people who worked wood in each town & village that it almost ended in a flop. Then, the master carpenters had the idea to ally with the much rarer and costlier quarrymen, stone carvers, sculptors, and masons who laid the finished blocks with mortar. Since the word 'mason' evoked the soaring, hallowed prestige of christian cathedrals made of clean stonework, the syndicate leaders decided to call their assembly 'masons' but added the prefix 'free' to the name to express that they were not subaltern to any crown or church, but to their paying customers. Another detail lost to history was that the original name was a Teutonic word spoken "Freimaurer" that translates directly from Germanic into the English "Freemason" since the organization was first tried in the upper reaches of Poland. Because education in the intellectual professions was so costly, only those who studied in a religious monastery could actually have access to the books and tutors to reach proficiency in architecture or engineering, while the more traditional crafts were usually taught in apprenticeships. This explains why the Masons are so intrinsically mixed with Christian Faith and Creed, and why they often engrave prayers and Biblical Siglae in their works to magically reinforce them. After all, channeling celestial energy through religious spells has always been the easiest way to learn magical prowess, no matter what vitriol the magus spew about "begging for spells" or "letting the god do all the work". In reality, the Freemasons are primarily mundane, squib or semi-spell-users, who specialize in a trade or craft, who then learn to enhance and bonify their products with effects granted by their Faith's Celestials or Angels.

There was the Flamel Alchemical Trades & Crafts Guild, who were essentially the snobby, high-browed version of the Freemasons, but accepting only professional alchemists, transmuters, pure spell-users, sorcerers, warlocks or arch-mages in their ranks. Given the very demanding nature of the rituals and reactions studied, having a naturally very large magical core was a necessity to avoid accidents during the work sessions. Also, while the Flamel Guild liked to declare they were real wizards and scientists who didn't borrow Power from unearthly sources like the priests, the facts were that many did in fact use channeling or other Powers gifted them by a patron Saint or Celestial when they were desperate for a positive outcome to their projects. As the saying goes, "Pride goeth before the Fall", and since many members of the guild were not well seen by mainstream mundane society because of their weird Creed and hypotheses, then they had to learn to speak and act like the other upper, erudite classes or else face public rebuke, and even denunciation to the Inquisition as being in league with daemons and witches. It was the major reason why the Flamel Guild existed for a time, but disappeared from public awareness in the late 1600's, in the paroxysm of the Catholic and Spanish Inquisitions. The Guild did not die, nor did it implode or succumb to betrayal, it simply did like the Illuminati, White Council and other groups, it went underground physically and magically to repel detection.

There was the Occultum Mundi Illuminati, a philosophical 'secret society' whose membership, Creed and goals were always nebulous, despite that the name means "to reveal the shadow world into the light". Few details were known about them, except they were supposedly based in Italy, either Rome or Venice, since nearly a thousand years back. A credible rumor has it that they are an offshoot from the Librarians of Venerable Antiquity that went utterly rogue, deciding to use the various artifacts they were recovering to further their goals and personal profit rather than seek to stabilize the planet for everybody. In fact, because it is such a deep secret, one suspicion is that Illuminati members are encouraged and supported in their efforts to join other, more visible groupings to gather internal data and have a public cover to hide their activities beneath.

The Miskatonic University in Massachusetts, USA, was an inter-disciplinary collegiate that served as guild, school, army barracks and residential citadel on the shores of one of the most mystically active rivers on the planet, rivaling the Amazon, the Dnieper or the Yellow rivers. The fortress was fist settled some 70,000 years back, before homo erectus became the dominant species of the world, by beings that came from another planet located in a different dimension. Many residents of Miskatonic only looked humanoid as they had adapted a shape that the weak minds of their neighbors or colleagues could accept without breaking. The school and military institutions were quite mercantile, mercenary even, since they never commanded individuals to reject contracts outside their walls, but only scrutinized and regulated those jobs done inside the citadel to keep social peace, and forbid stealing the research or samples of another member. While not in any ways an actual British Colony, nor a bastion of white European males, the Miskatonic river basin had been far too intrinsic to the development of -EVERY- magical society on the planet for any Nation, culture, religion, college, sect or guild to ignore them. However, one visited the place at the risk of one's sanity, as the usual rules of metaphysics were wonky on the best of days, which were few. Even more important was that the flora and fauna along the watershed of the river had been so polluted by isotopes, radiations and organic dejections or offal during those seventy thousand years that all things were mutated into being grotesque, horrifying depravities who only sought to rend your flesh whilst profaning your mind before they consumed your shattered soul. Nobody went to the Miskatonic area without martial training and weapons of warfare, lest they be wanting a quick, messy end without sepulture to house their remains.

And finally, from the biggest human groups, there were the nearly 7,000 Christian or Biblical inspired denominations who kept on going, despite that their God and his Angels had mostly killed each other off in a Heavenly War some 900 years back. It was important to note that the majority were not European, nor even white-skinned devotees, as the world had changed much in the last 2,000 years. Unfortunately for them all, the Hallowed Halls of Heaven were torn asunder during the War of the Fallen, the Pearly Gates hanging askew as plants, animals, horrors and looters took over the once glorious temples, houses and parks. The few mortal human priests who could still cast true Faith miracles were either surviving Angels hiding amongst the mortals, or humans who owned a functional relic crafted before The Ending. In any ways, the hundreds of thousands of priests that toiled for Christianity today, those not frauds or crooks, did it out of pure hope far more than for getting magical prayers granted.

The Vordak admitted honestly that his studies of culture and politics were well out of date, and that he had read almost only about European, mostly white and christian, sects, guilds and groupings. That was the way of things in his epoch, and even the advent of Apparition and Gate spells didn't make transferring knowledge from one country to another any simpler, or cheaper. One constant throughout history was that "knowledge is power", as proven by Dryskholl's chosen strategy to help the child without being discovered. That meant that in a primitive era, you could learn only what you had the money to buy, but those titled noblemen, guild-men or priests in place would try their best to limit what was available to hands not their own. Bishop Gloutnay had a myopic view of the world seen through the British Kingdom because that was his reality when he lived, and it still was to this day because he could not stay awake for long periods unless the House Van Uttebatten tasked him with a prolonged chore.

That honest limitation of mind & means having been sorted out of the way, the ghosts took over to explain a few superficial details about the many intelligent societies and cultures that were present on Earth, back in their days. Maybe they still lived? Magical tourism was a great way to prepare a child for apprenticeship or formal schooling.

There was a race of winged humans called 'Buteos' that had the capacity to fly at up to 50,000 feet in the air. They had spells that could densify the clouds enough to be able to build plots of land for farming and residences. These were often mistaken for angels by religious followers even though they were just ordinary mortals.

Likewise, there were multiple races and sub-races amongst the elvish species, and they had their own winged kindred called 'Averiel', just as they had amphibious types and elementally inclined sorts for living in ice or underground.

There were the fabled dwarves, gnomes and halflings that many authors had popularized, but it surprised no one here as these writers were all citizens of one of the magical sects or enclaves who had used their basic knowledge to amuse the mundane masses harmlessly.

The reputations as primitive, bestial monsters made to the goblinoid, orcoid, ogrish and trollish races were quite a shameful thing, since these peoples had their own styles of magic and Faith which produced uniquely charming results to behold. Yes, they were in fact warrior cultures, but they did value honor and a certain sense of fair-play in single combat. If you tried a large-mass war against one of their cities, then you would experience something similar to what the human authors have been describing for the last three centuries or so.

The Fae and Fairies were a subject of very spirited debate, with many contentious declarations on all sides, but one single agreement; the Sidhe (Fae nobility) Courts were not to be trifled with. Human magic had precious little effect against a fully trained Fae, meaning only a skilled Slayer or specifically trained Grimm Hunter could take one on and hope to win while still healthy enough for the victory to mean anything. The four main Fae species and their natural home planes were:

Seelie (light) living in the connective demi-plane 'Never-Never' or 'Neverland'

Unseelie (Dark) living in the 'Border Ethereal' connective plane

nug-Seelie / Wyldfae (Neutral) living in the 'Mirrorscape'

akr-Seelie / Nexfae (Stygyan) living in the 'Styx River' connective demi-plane.

Each major species then split into hundreds of races and sub-races, which nobody had ever done a full survey of. Several races also lived in the 'Spirit World', the 'Dreamscape', the 'Astral Plane' and several of the elemental planes. Fae could travel rather easily to all the other para-elemental, higher, lower and external planes or dimensions, due to the large repertoire of portal and gate spells their cultures have accumulated over aeons. It is almost unheard of to find a Fae living in the void of space, but since that admission comes from a few Fae testimonies, most humans are weary of trusting that information. Because they rarely lived full-time in this dimension or plane, and their natural habitats are usually harmful to unshielded humans, it was rather rare for encounters between the two species to be long or meaningful. Skirmishes and criminal behavior however, abounded plentily, since both sides believed that living in a different plane of existence made them immune from pursuit and retribution by their victims' relatives.

The phantasmic group then engaged in a general, superficial discourse on the Divines, Celestials, Angels, Demons, Spirits, Elementals, and Pure Souls who were also called Ascended or Exalted according to where they stood on their initiatic path towards becoming Celestial. Then a very general overlook of the common types of undead or unquiet souls and animated aberrations of flesh or offal was done. Those last parts of the discussion had poor Harry holding his head in pain at the overwhelming torrent of raw information he had just absorbed about the world he lived in without seeing any of it before. He knew his eyes were bad, but had he been blind?

{ HP } --- { The Awakening of an Archmage } --- { HP }

Suddenly, Bishop Gloutnay declared that the ritual arrays and components were ready, and it was time for the Awakening Rite to be accomplished. Seeing the boy's interrogative mien, the old Lord Van Uttebatten decided to explain in greater detail what was about to happen.

"You will drink a potion that will trigger small, controlled reactions inside your body, mind, magic and soul to test the 'connectivity' between yourself and the multiple Realms of Power that exist. This testing will then leave an active linkage that can be trained into Gifts or Spells later on in life, if you have the resources or the will to elevate the potential into usable trades or crafts. The drawings all around serve to stabilize the person undergoing the rite so that they do not become sick, injured or die from accidentally over-charging their magical channels before they are ready for such a surge of raw Power flowing through. Because the testing is so exhausting for the short duration it lasts, the celebrant always winds up in a healing slumber, so the potion you will imbibe has curative herbs in it to feed you during your recovery."

Nodding at the instructions given, the child removed all his clothing and donned the thin white linen shirt that was provided by the floating cleric for this single usage. Since he would sweat a lot and exude vapors from the diverse Powers and toxins being scanned, it was normal that the shirt be destroyed when he awoke from the rite's sleep, as it could never be used again. Handing the poor, well shaken boy, who no longer knew which world he lived in, a golden chalice filled with the holy elixir, the noble Vordak priest gestured for him to drink it all in one go.

Half-way through the draught, Harry dropped the metal cup, soon following it to the stone floor as his meager body began to react very strongly with the potion. Bishop Gloutnay watched on with the placid indolence of those whom walked hand-in-hand with Death, no longer in a hurry nor afraid of anything the Multiverse could send his way. Besides his hovering form floated the ghostly host, peering intently on the child's contorting body and mind as they fought with themselves to behold, accept and adapt to the newfound wellsprings of Powers inside him.

Inside his own Soul, Harry had no choice but to let the Rite enact a basic mindscape for him because his hadn't activated when it should have. In order to accept the incoming data he needed an organized, self-regulated mindscape so he could slow it down enough to perceive, analyze and sort everything the Rite would perceive and do for him. This was actually one of the fundamental functions of the Awakening; to instill a working foundation of mind magic upon which the child would then build his Identity, Dreamscape and Inner-World so he could try to repel attempts at mind-rape, curses & potions that enslave, memory wipes, and possession. If the child's Blood-Law and Blood-Compact had been blocked or damaged, the ritual could, to some small degree, force the partial activation of whatever Legacy his Chartered Bloodline had granted him at birth, if he were part of such noble Tradition. To be fully capable of psychomancy and self-regulation would take many years, and only if he had an affinity for that art, otherwise it may waste decades of studies for little avail. Once the initial Inner-World was in place, the results from testing each nerve, vein, gland, bone, muscle and organ started pouring in to inform the boy on his physical standing. This was followed by the flow of data from his brain about his mental acuity, bandwidth, frequencies, and processing power if he wanted to study advanced mental dweomers or the much more demanding Psionic Arts. Then the rite tested all the Basal Realms, from Electricity through Channeling, Essence, Mentalism and Primal Essaence, going up to Mythal, Shadow, Wild, Psionics, Mana, Soul and finally Energon.

The data stream then changed drastically as the test began to actively scan deeply into his personal DNA and the ectoplasm matrix of his soul to look for Talents & Gifts, before widening to pulse through the Blood Law of each House he was linked to by Blood, Oath, Debt or Conquest, inscribing the long list of concepts and Family names in his cellular memory. While this was not a fully established Heritage Ritual nor a genuine Legacy Spell, it did give the child an idea whether it would be time and effort well spent to seek those two spells to ascertain his clanic and biological background further. Not to mention that any potential new family links were always good for those who were orphaned or exiled from home, whatever the reason for such drastic events.

Once the Awakening Rite had finished pulsing inside the child, it pushed outwards, forcing his aura and soul magic to exteriorize for the first time in his life. A gaseous nimbus composed of many layers in tones of bluish, golden, silvery and pale white coalesced into an ethereal sphere around the prone child, with hundreds of small scintillating glyphs, icons and runes floating around each layer. These occult symbols were the format of basic mind magic, mentalism, psionics and soul magic. When a person was able to willingly manifest their aura, they could read the formulae written to understand the state of their body, mind, magic and soul, thus being able to detect foreign intrusions, contaminations, injuries and unwanted modifications. This aura also allowed the user to effect voluntary changes like a control panel, although what was displayed should never be altered as it was a TRUE representation of the person. Any alteration to the ectoplasmic scriptures would immediately inflict the described situation unto the person, from their soul or DNA up, to suffuse every part of their being. There were however limits; you couldn't cure cursed conditions like bestial lycanthropy or bitten-vampirism, and most undead were actually devoid of souls that were intact enough for the aura to become visible to be of any use. Furthermore, free-willed or greater undead often wanted their status to remain as they had power and benefits mortals could not dream of, in a way similar to the Exalted and Ascended.

The ghostly host, house-elf and hovering Vordak Lord peered intensely at the glowing scriptures that were swimming in the various orbits of the gaseous nimbus. Bishop Gloutnay straightened with a satisfied noise, having beheld what he wanted to know. Young elfling Dryskholl had much experience with mind & soul magicks as his bad masters before Hoggy-Wartsy had been specialists of these Dark Arts. He could see where Harry's health needed immediate shoring-up, and what he could do with his meager means. Other, deeper problems would have to wait until the proper components could be harvested or bought from the many magical marketplaces around Europa, Slavia, Britannia and America. The poor elfling had no idea of what was where in the other continents unless he read a merchant's road-map, just like anybody else. The elderly Lord Van Uttebatten was well pleased with the accomplishments that this last Awakening had produced in his family's ritual chamber. As a last hurrah for his clan's memory, it was quite a success to their dead name.

With his aura returning into his body and soul, young Harold Potter slowly lowered himself to the lukewarm stone floor, falling into a deep healing sleep that would last for several hours until he awoke far fresher and in better health than ever in his six years of life. At that point, he would hear the plans that were discussed during his absence and be asked for his decisions concerning his lucky and prosperous future schooling.

{ HP } --- { The Arch-Lord of Gaia is risen! } --- { HP }

Harry yawned ans stretched himself awake near seven o'clock in the morning, on the first Saturday of his first Christmas break during his elementary schooling. The worse part of it all, he reminded himself was not that he would have to endure the Dursley's more for three weeks, it was that he would have to return to the septic tank of a school when it was done. Honestly, the adults should just openly call it a kids' prison and be done with it!

Yawning anew, the boy suddenly seized in fear-induced paralysis. Or should it be terror? As his tired mind rebooted from the exhaustion and lack of food, the poor maligned child had a catastrophic memory of what his teacher had tried to do with him, just on the eve of the vacation. The boy rolled into a fetal ball on his left side, facing towards the stone wall, not yet able to see the chamber around him nor acknowledge that he was not alone. It took several minutes for the shakes and shivers of the post-trauma adrenaline drop to subside, and a few more for the first more dramatic results of the Awakening to be felt inside his mind.

He had spells!

He now had four things floating inside his memories that were called "spell lists", which were as the name indicated clearly; lists of spells classified by subject or logical association, then ordered by the level of experience, difficulty and Powers required to cast them safely. This was a neat system! It was like having an encyclopedia in his mind, that he could flip the pages and scroll around to find what he needed at the speed of thought.

The four spell lists made him cry silently when he saw their names, and what they did. They were part of what was called 'Blood-Compact', a process that his parents had to willingly prepare by ritual when they reached the end of adolescence. The 'Compact' was a genetically and spiritually encoded copy of their knowledge, lives, and the general history, culture and mystical practices of the families each hailed from. Even though his mother was a muggle-born, she had managed to integrate images, sounds, odors and touch from her parents and grand-parents, much to the bewilderment of his father who had never know this could be done with ancestors who had no magic inside them. Given the complexity of the 'Compact' ritual, the information was supposed to download itself into his active memory at a steady rate, but split by segments across several years of his life. He should have gotten the 'Blood-Borne Identity' at age 2 and 'Familial Culture' at age 4 but the damned potions and blocks by Dumbledore had, well, blocked them.

All four spell lists were part of what is referred to as "The Childish Lists" by those who study profound magical theory, with divination, Blood & Soul Magicks. They were the 'Child of the Darkes' that set the 'Blood-Compact' in place, the 'Childish Lifeways' that granted survival and basic life skills, the 'Childish Defenses' to help keep the kid alive with a few combat skills and -limited- harmful effects, and finally the 'Childish Trickeries' that were never spoken of among polite society. That last one was mostly to help stay alive if the child was abandoned or cast to the streets as it had many skills and effects to turn an infant into a competent hoodlum who could steal, break-in, or sabotage much more easily than any mundane would.

Presently, there were a few things that were slowly coming to the fore of his memory and mind to be acknowledged and used immediately. Directly from having destroyed or lessened several blocks on his body, mind, core and soul, several events scheduled in the 'Child of the Darkes' list were coming to fruition all together in rapid succession. The memories left by his two lineages began to install themselves, then he saw in his Inner-Eye a strange glyph that he just knew was his own personal representation before Mother Magyck and the Divines, for now at least since he also knew that it would change as he experienced life. Then he was biologically and psychologically weaned off the need for a wet-nurse, even though he'd never had such a privileged arrangement since living with the Dursley's. This was followed by a quick, dirty and on-the-fly setup of his Identity parameters, basic Dreamscape and -again- the basic Mindscape which then led to the surprising redoing of the Awakening as an automatic process from within himself, but without needing the potion or outside help. Apparently, like one of the primitive computers they had in the Surrey Public Library, the brain & soul had to reboot whenever a series of drastic changes were made for those modifications to be absorbed functionally.

Coming awake far faster and less groggy following the second Awakening was a good thing as he now also remembered where he was, and who was present with him. Instinctively he used a small spell called 'Consolidate Conscience' to boost his morale and spiritual fortitude in the moment, to avoid another bout of panic or losing himself to a stress-induced slumber. Dropping into a coma whenever things were rough, abnormal or fuck-all-weird just didn't seem like a good tactical choice anymore, not now that he had a vague idea of what was strolling around the multiple layers of Reality unseen.

Standing up from the ground, Harry turned to look at the beings that had just given him the three best, most durable, gifts they could have ever handed him; the knowledge of his family, his connection to his living magic, and a few handful of easy, quick spells to help pull him through tough situations without any flashy-bangy effects that would attract nefarious attention. All three were now permanently and solidly installed within himself, and it would take something like brain damage, squibbing oil or an uncontrolled 'Obliviate' to rip that out of him.

Bowing from the neck in gratitude to the Conclave, he announced aloud "I am Harold Jamieson Evans Potter, Heir of Potter, Heir of Evans, Heir of Peverell, Heir Presumptive of Black, and future Earl of Claymoors, and Peer of the Realms Britannic." Straightening his back, he folded his hands pensively over his abdomen in a polite fashion, ending with "I am well met to all of you, and truly grateful for the services that you have rendered unto me and my houses, by hauling us from the trash-heap of History. May you be lauded in Life and in Death, so says Potter, so mote it be."

"So mote it be!" replied the ghostly host, Vordak and house-elf with gusto, as they were now in a celebratory mood. Bishop Gloutnay still had one question though; "And yar Creeds, lad? Have you beheld the Divines and figured out which would give your life and magic meaning? It can wait if you haven't, but if ye did, then you must speak them aloud for it to be Truth unto the worlds of the living, the dead and the Fae."

Nodding serenely, Harry explained "I have seen the great green glory of Gaia, the Mother Earth, the Vessel of Life, and found myself comforted, at home in her solid bones, incandescent blood, and gentle green fingers. But from her I would draw sustenance and endurance, and Powers to match my storming rage at all the injustices that were committed against my Families. She cannot give me peace, nor contentment. Those feelings I can only receive from Death, from the act of ending those that have betrayed, raped, injured and exploited my families in the name of foul causes that are as false as their public façades and social standings. In Hades do I find solace, and final, true Justice for those torts and grievances we have suffered from knaves. Furthermore, I now understand that both Dumbledore and the defective monster that attacked our home would never be stopped by ordinary magicks or artifacts. Only those blessed by Hades could impose a final, true Death unto the cowardly despots, sending them before the Throne of Judgment to face the one divinity they both fear above even Belzebuth in Hell Everburning."

Nodding wisely, the old Lord Ulyrance Van Uttebatten gave a polite little hand clap to show his approval for those revelations the boy had underwent so traumatically. For a complete novice, he was pulling out of it with grace, aplomb and fortitude that few possessed so young, or much older to be honest. Many a soldier he had served alongside of would not, at 30 or 40 years of age, had the courage or sheer bullheadedness to forge on as Harry did.

The elfling Dryskholl tutted as he shook a finger at his human. "You's can be finding the Faiths in the Celestials later! These be long studies and hard tests to prove faith and worth, not something done over dinner like reading the papers. You get showered and dressed, mees be making food and hot tea for us. Dryskholl be hungry, after almost an entire day of fasting while the rituals happened. Master Harry ate even less yesterday, so he bees needing food now!"

Nodding in approval, the child and unliving agreed with the servant's logic. Since Harry was indeed peckish and a bit weak, he sped his way through his washing and changing, the wonderful smell of the hot tea kettle dragging him by the nose as if it were an actual spell. Then again, he was a growing boy and he never truly ate to his hunger's needs over the last five years, so that could be the simple explanation too. The bestial growl from his stomach certainly said so.

During his wash, Harry enjoyed the incredible feel of his magic flowing through his mind and limbs as he used the few, low-powered spells the Childish Lists had revealed to him for sanitation and self-maintenance in case he had no home or lived in a deficient dwelling. Those few menial dweomers would mean the difference between death and survival in the streets or any orphanage en ended in, after poor Dryskholl died and he was finally alone again.

Deciding to banish those dreary thoughts for the moment, Harry concentrated on enjoying the conjured chair charmed for comfort and warmth, and the real food that the elf had taken from the school's kitchen above. Ha may be small and sickly, but that elf could cook like nobody Harry had ever met! He absolutely had to learn those recipes and tricks before the poor little guy died.

Squirming happily from the praise the human child gave him so openly, Dryskholl could feel a small trickle of magic entering him, originating from the boy's subconscious desire to accept him and not see him hurt or sick. It had been more than five years since the poor elfling had felt the emotions and support of Family and Blood-Law filling his core and mind; the feeling was almost inebriating with how raw, natural and pure the child's Power was.

{ HP } --- { Farewell, old friends } --- { HP }

After taking an hour to eat and speak of easy subjects like how the meal had been prepared and how kitchen work in a magical household was different from mundanes, the Bishop Gloutnay whispered his ethereal words unto the group. Hold his funerary urn aloft, the skeletal pontiff spoke in no uncertain terms. "It is time for the Pledge. My life in this Prime Material Plane has been fruitful and filled with acts of honor, feats of magicks unparalleled, and the presence of noble entities unto the last hour that I could whelm dweomers in the hallowed names of my Gods. I shalt walk unto this path willingly, happily, marching towards the Light that calls all beings to It when the End comes to pass. For the Grand Gate of Reality am I bound, and so before Mystra, Mother of All Magycks, Spouse of Archas Theos, Patron of all Occult Sciences, Mother of Azuth, Guardian of all Runes, do I finally depose the Charge of my Task amongst yon mortal beings. As I was commanded, I hath brought thee the inscrutable mysteries of the Multiverse, and the teachings of the Traditions of the Old Ways. May my passage into the Beyond be celebrated as the Wheel of Days turning anew, as a festival of Seasons and Souls."

The ghostly alderman Van Uttebatten floated forth, right hand over his heart as he intoned in a ceremonial tone "We here assembled for the last time in this world and the next, the Ancient and Noble House of Van Uttebatten hereby grant our faithful servant Grahaut Gloutnay, the Bishop of Mystra, Abbot of Brutnor Abbey, Father confessor of our Bloodline, the leave to march unto the Path of Light, that he may reach the Grand Gate of Reality. May Hades judge you fairly and render your soul unto thine goddess, to serve her thence as ye did here. So mote it be."

"By Van Uttebatten blood oath, so mote it be." chorused the ghostly host.

Gesturing with his heavy abbatial staff, the flying priest invited the house-elf to join him in the middle of the room, inside the ritual circle that began to glow a lambent blue when the undead entered its perimeter scripts. Nodding solemnly, the sickly elf slowly walked to stand in the circle, opposite the being whose holiness had been such that it transcended the barriers of life, death and society to keep on giving to his houses and community.

The undead's whispery voice rose anew; "I have no blood to initiate the Pledge, but this can be bypassed through the application of Soul Magick. I trust you know how to extrude your nimbus to demonstrate your true self unto the Divine? Then we shall both do so, and I shall connect the glyphs to enact the tithes and transference. When the rite is complete, my body shall lower to the floor and the bones will turn to dust, magically being sucked into my urn so that it can be interred at my crypt, at the abbey. The mitre will no longer be magical, and no longer be able to hold any enchantments due to the strength of all it endured for my creation. My crosier however, could still be used as a weapon or even re-enchanted for a different purpose, though the shape befits the cult of Mystra. You could also melt the gold to have some few riches to stabilize your life before entering formal schooling at Hogwarts or elsewhere you choose."

Signaling towards the open tunnel that led down to the holding cell where he slept between calls, the Vordak Lord told Harry "I have no family that remain. I knew this when I accepted the task of becoming the Servant for my patron house. As such, I leave you in heritage the meager items that you will find below. While old and worn, most will be of usage for your basic education, until you can craft or purchase versions more fitted to your own Faiths, trades and occult arts."

Having nothing else to say in the sad, mournful occasion, the boy simply nodded gratefully his head because if he tried to speak he would probably end up bawling out loud.

Both servant beings intoned the prayer they favored to expose their soul magick, showing four-tiered nimbuses of glyphs and lines that told of their lives, Faiths, Creeds, magicks and deeds. The Vordak swiftly established thin threads of gaseous ectoplasm between his nimbus and that of the elf, then chanted a long-worded, slow paced spell. After five minutes, when he quieted, it was Dryskholl who chanted an equally long-worded, slow paced and deeply involved response.

The actual transfer of life-force and magick took barely a minute to accomplish, given just how drained the skeletal guardian had been. They all knew the rite was complete when the glowing lines of ectoplasm linking the participants darkened from lack of power, then dissipated back to the ether. Mere seconds later, the unliving priest slowly dropped to the floor in a heap, his bones becoming a small maelstrom of dust particles that swirled around the piled clothing until it was siphoned into the cast iron urn. Whence it was once a shiny black as if just oiled and polished, the urn was now tarnished with age and wear, no longer spreading magic around it. The clothes were discolored and threadbare, with holes appearing where the self-mending charms no longer held the tissue together. Only the hardy wooden staff and gold ornament had survived unscathed.

Without a word, Dryskholl moved a hand over the urn, making it disappear as he sent it to the Brutnor Abbey catacombs, where Father Gloutnay had a crypt waiting for his remains since he had held the title of Abbot in his flesh life. With that last part done, the young elf snapped his fingers loudly, making all the contents of the lower cellar pack itself and teleport to the small workmen's shelter that served as Harry's true home for the moment. Given the highly emotional ritual that had just happened, the elf understood the lad would not be in any condition to wade through the personal belongings of the only adult who had given him any protection or solace in this life to date.

Sitting forlornly on his conjured chair, Harry asked quietly "Dryskholl? Why did he have to die before you bonded to my House? I think he would have liked to see that happen, don't you?"

Nodding kindly, the elfling moved to stand before the boy, patting his arm gently to avoid scaring him as he had never been touched without violence for so long. "Master Bishop knew it was his time, so he left. But, he also knew that Dryskholl could not bind to Potter family correctly because I hads too little magick left inside. All my powers were goings into living to see the next day. To see you better and safer. I needed the new energy to create a good, solid bond with yous to help yous as an elf should care for his master."

Understanding the need, but not liking the reality of it, Harry didn't blame either of them. It was what it was, because of this bastard Dumbledore, and because that was the life that servants usually had imposed on them. The few history lessons he had received in the school above them were pretty clear about it; mundane or magical, servants were rarely seen as better than livestock to be bartered, sold, used and abused, and sacrificed so that the House at large could endure. It was a deplorable mindset, but it also seemed to be ingrained in magick itself, as if it truly was the Natural Order of Things. Harry wasn't sure he accepted this, but he didn't know enough to argue the point, so he'd set it aside and read about it. Maybe meet a few magical beings who could have a discussion with him to grasp what was eluding him at present.

{ HP } --- { The first Bond of the new House Potter } --- { HP }

Squeaking in sympathy, Dryskholl asked meekly "If young Master Harry Potter is ready, wees can be doing the bonding ritual now. Mees be wanting a family for so long, and yous be needing an elf that can protect yous from bad muggles and magees. Dryskholl will do that for yous."

Nodding in admission of the truth, Harry stood to join the diminutive being in the ritual circle, waiting for the entity to show him how it was done. Dryskholl began by chanting a prayer in Latin, then made the response text appear in glowing green letters that floated in the air before Harry's impressed eyes. Harry instinctively used one of the childish spells to understand the Latin prayer and have the ability to speak it aloud. The spell lasted only a few minutes per casting, but it would be sufficient for this. After finishing the prayer, Harry felt an impulse that came from deep within, and then saw a memory of his grand-father Charlus Potter as he bound a new elf to the entirety of the House. Following the same gestures and intent he perceived from the ancestral memory, the child used another of the childish spells to cause a small cut to appear painlessly on his right index so he could finger-paint the simplified version of the Potter Crest that served for such purposes. He then sung a different prayer, to welcome Dryskholl into service for ALL of the houses and organizations that he led, represented, or defended, while still keeping preeminent leadership over the elf's activities and well-being so that nobody could hijack the poor creature to act against Harry or the Potters again.

The surge of magick was so intense that it made the elfling glow with an eldritch green aura for several minutes, and when the light abated, it revealed an elfling that was far healthier than before. He was less lean, less discolored, and fewer illness blotches visible, and stood as tall as his naturally short height permitted because his spine was no longer hurting him all the time. In truth, it looked from outside as if a miracle had happened, but the elf told them otherwise.

"It is as the Lofty Bishop told us before the Awakening Rite. I have been given more weeks to serve the houses of Master Harry, but not more than that. I will not see his 8th birthday. My body was healed enough to serve without suffering or being limited in whats I can bees doing, but nothing more. I accepting the magicks of the Houses, I also accepted that Time would demand to be paid for the deeds done. I accepted the price. That be Wisdom of the Ages, Master Harry, that ALL magicks and Psionics have price to pay for their uses, and the greatest feats command the steepest costs. None can escape this, ever, and any who tell you they can, or that Gods can, is a deluded, dangerous fool trying to build a cult, or a simple con-man trying to sell you a bottle of fake miracles that will addict you until your life wastes away in consumption."

Agreeing with the facts since arguing or raging would do no good, Harry nodded as there really was nothing else to do. As for magick demanding payment, he had figured out something similar on his own at the beginning of last evening, when the ghosts presented themselves to explain where he was, and what had been hidden from him. He had known all his life that any durable goods had to be made by somebody who toiled and strained for it; the Dursley's prided themselves on their clean house and lush garden, but neither could have happened without a servant to do it as they were too lazy or self-absorbed to do the hard labor. Since they had not the money to pay a mad service, the unwanted child dropped on their doorstep had done it for them, free of charge to them, but full of pain, shame and misery for him. Yes Harry was well acquainted with the concept of -paying- for services, goods and benefits, and how the costs were greater when you wanted something bigger, better or more prestigious than the neighbors.

{ HP } --- { Passing into the mists of Time } --- { HP }

Frowning, the boy asked softly, fear coloring his voice, "What now? What do we do?"

The ghost of old mister Van Uttebatten came forth to lay his cold ectoplasmic hand on the child's thin, bony shoulder as he spoke for the final farewell. "Now, you and your new bondsman walk out into the wide world of Gaia. Our old, dead House can no longer assist you. The scriptural circles that serve as our foci have given all they had left. Soon, our manifestations in this realm will cease. When that happens, the magicks that have protected this last bastion of our Bloodline will expire, and so will the structural integrity of this 1,200 year old chamber. The stonework will become as worn and decrepit as the vordak's old priestly robes, the mortar brittle and frayed to such extent that the room could collapse."

Taking an affected breath for pause as he didn't really need one, the alderman explained "As one last favor to the world of the living, and to make certain you have at least that much stability in your life, the last great work of our magic will be to convert this dank hall. It will be transmuted to an equivalent of what the other basement portions of the building around it have for materials and design. The Bishop was kind enough to cast a 'Comprehend Estate' divination when he first awoke from his sleep, so he programmed the renovation sequence into the array, during one of your sleep cycles due to the stresses and rituals. One good result of this will be that the room will be unrecognizable, and all the devices for pain or coercion will be destroyed, their materials used to feed the transmutation. Finally, as we pass into the Great Beyond for real, our Bloodline will offer this establishment that bears our name one last boon. We shall enact a Faith blessing upon the land plot to anchor a ward against criminal behavior and deviant desires. Unfortunately, without an initiated congregation to chant mass every week or a manatite, the ward will last only for a few months, probably enough to last until your summer vacations, and maybe until the end of them. No further, though.

"July, then," Harry murmured softly, "That's when it all falls apart again. Well, Dryskholl and I will just have to work hard to prepare for that. And if your good behavior ward cleans up the school as advertised, then maybe that kindness will last a few years past its expiration. The teachers and custodians didn't all turn into monsters over night, it took decades of neglect and ignorance from the district managers to make it happen. Not to mention the hordes of parents that know about the school's climate or have strong doubts but close their eyes because, in reality, they want to have their kids broken to make them docile and easier to manage at home."

"You see the shame of our ancestors exposed before you, child" old Ulyrance said desolately as he gazed towards the ceiling of the antiquated stone room. "Our land was never meant to house a schooling edifice, and I don't recall there being one when I was alive, yet this structure purports to be older than my lifetime. I understand not how this is possible, lest Fae or Spirits were involved in making a 'Temporal Inclusion' to change an established event to suit some need that over-arched every other priority in the English Kingdom at that period. That is one mystery more that you will have to solve, as you settle your affairs in order for your life to be free."

Harry chewed on his lower lip as he looked at the room's fading array of circles and scripts, and the ghosts that were becoming translucent before his eyes. Tearing up at the sight of his first true friends disappearing into the Endless Night, the boy bowed his head and closed his eyes to avoid the sight of being abandoned again, even if it wasn't their will to leave him. When he opened his eyes again, the room was dark save for a small white candle that Dryskholl had set on the empty cement floor to let him move around safely. During his silent mourning, the Van Uttebatten magic had done its job flawlessly. The ancient stonework had been converted integrally to concrete and steel beams, with even the plumbing, vents and electrical sockets where the modern architects would have set them. The soulless industrial light fixtures with fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling, waiting for their switch to be flipped. The three fireplaces and chimneys were gone, as were the washing alcove and the stairs down to the vordak's cell. Now, all that remained was a totally empty second basement without anything to occupy or fill it.

A blank canvas for what came next.

Harry frowned angrily at the empty cavern of drab gray preformed cement as an idea took hold in his mind. If he were going to be wasting his time inside this damned children's prison, then he might as well make himself at home and live his body, mind, magic and soul as if they mattered to himself at least, if to nobody else. But first, he had some things to get in hand to set up for the rest of the day, like a clock that was mechanical so that magic bursts didn't affect the circuits.

Calling to the elf, Harry began to explain his plan in short, direct words. Soon, the elf was nodding his head as he could see that it was a good plan. It even had a few escape routes built into it, for the dark day that would eventually come, when the Magical Ministry of Wizarding Britain would call on him to attend Hogwarts, even if he didn't want to. They had an army, however small and badly trained, whereas he had nobody to help him resist. So he would have to fake being happy at going, and be prepared to defend himself at each turn of the road.

Harry's first education via house-elf

(Harry Potter - theme)

1986  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

Harry Potter may have been only 6 years old when all the shite went down the pipe, but he had already lived five straight years of misery that had wound up with him living almost completely in the streets before even entering primary school. His no-good relatives should have been reported to CPS or the police, but nobody did. He had learned, on that fatidic day of his Awakening that it was the fault of an evil wizard named Dumbledore who manipulated, mind-raped or killed anybody who stood in the way of his 'Greater Good of Wizarding Britain' as only he could define or justify.

But, now that he had indeed passed his Awakening Rite, young Heir Potter was a much different, and much better prepared, child than the mindless drug-zombie pawn Dumbledore had been grooming from afar, well out of reach of any discovery or retaliations. Harry's magic and psionics were partially unbound while his mind, manual skills and willpower had been totally freed from the limiters and dumb-down unctions that had been poisoning him for years. With his mental faculties, survival instincts and street-life acumen unfettered, the boy could now plan ahead competently in a manner that would see him live through this lonely Hell, and eventually prosper out of street-life.

Being well aware that his new companion -slash- servant Dryskholl the house-elf was sick and not due to live long, Harry planned everything for being alone again, right from the start. It had no use for his survival to just live with the elf in blind beatitude when it was a foregone conclusion that by the end of July the little green entity would be dead and buried. So, Harry took advantage of the two great boons that the House of Van Uttebatten had left him when they imploded at last, following his Awakening. A school that was now warded against evil intents, and a brand new, large but empty concrete bunker that was far more modern and livable than the small underground alcove he had converted, beneath the train tracks of Little Whining.

Yes, that was his first bright idea; move his permanent living space from the tunnel to the school's newly rebuilt and cleaned second basement, near the access hatches to the city's service grid tunnels. He would do like the house-elves prided themselves of accomplishing by moving unseen, unheard and without trace, from one end of town to the other, to run his business as he pleased without risking the bloody bobbies or bossy adults trying to command his life.

In fact, the accursed elfling was invited to make himself a bed nook just like Harry so they could spend as much time together without the elf spending magic on traveling all that much. The house-elf agreed quite gratefully, so he went to his island retreat to pack all of his cluttered belongings to transfer them to Van Uttebatten academy, to live out his last days in peace besides his new family.

With elfin aid, it would be easy for him to learn how to prepare candles, lamp oil or how to cast a blue-bell flame to house in a glass jar that would serve as his marching lantern and camp stove whenever he decided to venture into the county's dank, dark bowels. That was a practical charm, those blue-bell flames, because they also burned like regular fire but were fed just as much by the inherent magic found in all items, and also in all lifeforms. That meant that Harry could eventually use a jar of flames to burn his trash with little odors resulting, or cast the charm at an enemy who would slowly but surely become wreathed in the blue fire until the entirety of its body was consumed and degraded to sterile ash. However, the flames were VERY slow to progress on anything deemed a living thing, including plants that had just been uprooted or cut, and many magical plants, animals and higher sentients had an innate resistance to magic cast at them, regardless of whether it was helpful or harmful.

But the important part was still that Harry had managed at age 6 to learn a spell that was usually taught to 11 year old's in the charms class of Hogwarts as a replacement to wood, coal or oil for household usage. It averred that he was quite good at learning direct-application spells, but Dryskholl warned him to take it easy, lest he drain his core in one spell and put himself in bed for a week as he recovered. If he overtaxed himself while the elf was himself sick or no longer present, Harry might have to call for outside help, and the price to pay for such may not be limited to coinage from his Gringotts vault.

But, the little elfling was nonetheless ecstatic to see his young master have such an easy grasp of the lower Power Realms, and of hedgecraft too. It warmed his heart to see that the Old Ways still had a future, and it tickled him to a greener shade to see it was a bloody titled noble Arch-Lord that would be bringing back all the Little Magicks into mainstream society. The fact that Dumbledore's paragon of Wizarding Light was shaping up to be more of a religious Hero of the Faithful Darkes was also a great amusement for the dying elfling. Anything that made that old Manipulator eat his own beard was good in his grimoire.

With both learning to say openly and clearly what they were thinking or needing because neither had reason to fear their roommate, the pair rapidly developed a good working relationship. The child wanted most, but not all, of his belongings in the tunnel shelter to be relocated in the school basement so he could live here full-time. He would still keep a small reserve as a precaution in case he was being hunted, injured, or the school was being watched by hostiles. There would be much better space to practice not only magic, but also the few combat gestures that he could read in self-defense guides, homeless living booklets or insurgency manuals that Dryskholl had selected for him before all of this came to a head.

When they began spending full days together, Harry Potter had been tickled pink to see that his house-elf had developed a taste for soap operas like his aunt Petunia had, as the small entity liked to watch the telly from 3 to 4 in the afternoon while he sipped his tea and nibbled some treat or candy to tide himself over till dinner. The elf had found an old television set that was crafted in the old style of having a large wooden cabinet all around, with hinged doors to close when the tube wasn't used. It was a color model made in 1980, and even had the fold-down 'rabbit ears' metal wire antennae to catch the free public channels from Britain and France If they could find and elongate the TV cable from the school, the set had the plug for it too, so they see more variety like sports. The human child laughed heartily for the first time in years but happily joined the elf in watching his soaps when he didn't have a class to attend, which was often as the three first years of primary usually sat courses from 9:00am till 3:00pm unless they had a public assembly or a PTA conference that day. He could avoid being in the hall for student assemblies because they tapped into the Public Address System wires to have their own speakers in their shared room. The Parent – Teacher meetings were never gonna happen anyways, since Petunia & Vernon had already had a 'chat' with the principal about how to handle Harry's problematic behaviors without bothering them for it. The rat-bastards had essentially put him in a den of perverts and told them "Free buffet; enjoy!" like his life, health and safety had no value to anybody. Well, two could play that game, but he'd win it in the end.

Well, if they got a change of attitude from the man because of the Van Uttebatten ward, or the county changed out the principal, then Dryskholl could simply put an elf-charm on him, which was a version of a compulsion that was usually employed on very young wizard children to keep them from harming themselves, but could work on muggle adults just as well. Speaking of charms, the pair worked to quickly set up house-elf scriptures all around the door frames, the new hearths and chimneys that Dryskholl wanted rebuilt and Harry agreed, and the perimeter of the room, along the floor and at the joint with the ceiling. These scriptures would cause a set of spells to shroud the main room, bathroom, storage closet, staircase access and tunnel access from outsiders, be they mundane or magicals. The effects were 'unplottable', 'unseen', 'unheard', 'unsmelled', 'repel mundane', 'repel evil' and 'redirect interest to home'. Since the scripts were not engraved in the cement, they could easily be erased for updates or add-ons later, if needed.

{ HP } --- { The gifts of Bishop Gloutnay } --- { HP }

By Sunday evening of that fateful weekend, Harry and Dryskholl had managed to bring all of their mutual belongings together into the new space they would share. Harry had himself a good laugh when he saw the collection of knives, axes, swords, firearms and munitions the small elfling had accumulated over the few months he had been free from Dumbledore's corrupted Bonds through Hogwarts. The child was actually happy about it, because it meant the elf could teach him correctly how to operate safely the weapons that would fit his small hands and light weight. Trying to shoot a two-barrel shotgun like Vernon kept in the ground-floor living room above the cheap gas fireplace would only end up with Harry on his ass with broken fingers.

The elf was quite proud to show Harry the full selection of books, manuals and guides he had chosen to give the boy as he grew older and more capable. He was made very happy when his young master thanked him profusely for his kindness and the excellently useful titles he had picked up. Even the texts about armed insurrection or thriving amongst the criminal elements of the street thugs and mafia would be put to good use, given that he was practically living that sort of life already, anyways. What he was obliged to do by now certainly wasn't the CPS version of healthy, safe and happy childhood with a supportive, law-abiding family.

As they were thinking of organizing the shelves and cubbies to store or display their stuff, the elfling snapped his fingers to call back the small pile of items that had been left by the vordak at his death. Depositing the legacies in the middle of the small wooden table where they were sorting things out, the house-elf made Harry look up from his inspection of one of the more complicated England, Scotland & Ireland harsh climate survival books that had caught his eye.

Sighing in deep sadness at the sight of the pile, the boy nonetheless pushed aside the fun things to get on with the 'formal affairs' as he had begun to call anything that dealt with death or passing on of heirlooms to family and friends. The pile contained a few books that were quite old but well preserved by charms and being rubbed with Oil of Eternity. There was a small cast iron brazier on a tripod whose usage eluded Harry for now. Next to that was a silver mirror mounted to a wooden rectangle frame, like a miniature version of a tailor's mirror but scaled to be put on a table or bench. A foot-wide shallow bowl cast from copper with four clawed feet and silver runes inlaid around the top rim and inside bottom was too simplistic to reveal its use immediately. Then there was the old traveling trunk, barely the size of a modern briefcase for all that it was very much crafted in the middle ages, given the carvings on all sides and the flat top that had a line of golden scriptworkes running around the edge. The small iron lock was amusing for Harry as it was the type he occasionally saw in cartoons where the ornate key had a single large tooth.

Taking his courage with both hands, the child began to take the books to see the titles and open the covers for a brief abstract, if the authors had put one in.

The first book was actually a strong surprise for both friends; it was the grimoire of minor House Dhennack, from the forefathers of Bishop Gloutnay. That book demanded respect for it contained the memories and works of multiple generations of priests, sorcerers and alchemists. It was a handwritten jewel that any museum or collector would be proud to own and display.

The second book was a wood-plate printed compendium of medicinal herbs and animal parts from the Kingdom of Bohemia in the late 1400's. The tome was important because it was the standard text for the army apothecaries of the kingdom in that period, meaning that the lords had considered its remedies to be functional and reliable enough to pay for the troops to be healed so.

The third book was a manuscript journal from an expert diviner who had lived near Paris in the 1300's, called Panaris du Sasseux in relation to the hamlet he had been born in before moving next to the French capital to ply his trade to rich folks wanting answers about the mysteries of the universe. While the man was too low-powered to cast spells or rituals above a street-side fortune teller, he had collected quite the folio of true dweomers and ceremonials that a fully empowered caster like Harry could easily put to good uses. It was always nice to see what the enemies were plotting without risking life or limb to get the information.

The fourth book was actually a large leather binder tied with oiled thread. It contained nearly three hundred loose pages of parchment with many scripts and drawings, usually in tones of black, blue, purple or white inks. These were the personal works of Bishop Gloutnay on Death and its meanings, effects and ways, from after he became vordak. To this date, nobody in human society had ever laid eyes on such a priceless piece of theoretical and practical necromantic workmanship.

The last book was a slim folio from the early 1400's, the manuscript pages bound in fraying silk and carton, with the title 'Brutnor Abbey' and a outline profile of buildings as cover art. It was revealed to be the Abbot's guide to the buildings, functions and management of the abbey, as well as the diverse secret passages, tunnels and warehouses in case of war or social unrest, as was common back in those days of the Middle Ages. Harry decided that he would find out of the buildings still stood so that he could visit, and maybe see where the holy vordak's urn now rested at peace.

Harry needed Dryskholl's help to figure out what the brazier, mirror and copper bowl were used for. They were tools mostly for the spells of divination, scrying, contacting and summoning, but could also be put to more regular jobs like heating or preparing candle wax, mixing incense paste, reducing lamp oil to proper consistency, etc... These were simply the basic tools that you could expect to find in the library or laboratory of any serious spell-user or psionicist who had developed a beginner's application of magical sensings and communications.

The sculpted wooden box was a different thing; it was a traveling altar. This kind of thing was normally reserved for those priests who had their own money revenue, came from a titled family who wanted to see them regularly, or held a job with a lot of prestige, like abbot. In this case, the decorated cassette had been commissioned by the parents of Bishop Gloutnay when he completed his seminary and received his accreditation's as a full cleric of Mystra. They may have come from a minor house, they still had standing and some revenues, so they invested in a thing that could bring back more profits and prestige for the entire family. A traveling altar is much more than just items; it is a fully consecrated, embedded and enchanted group of artifacts that are designed to collaborate for a combined result. It can turn the prayers and spells of a mediocre priest into powerful effects, and even more if the man's power was lacking but he compensated by many readings on his Faith and theoretical studies on magic itself.

The box was made to carry the basic necessities for a mass or rite inside the use the flat top as the actual altar during the active phase of the spells. The kit held small travel format Tome of Mystra and Tome of Archas Theos; a Missel from Brutnor Abbey; a runed table cloth and two runed tea towels; five squat copper candle holders each bearing a glyph for one of the primal elements; a copper chalice with ivory inlays; a plain silver goblet; several herbology utensils made of wood, silver, copper and iron; and finally a small folding scale composed of the vertical pole, the balance beam and the two plates on chains, all in bronze. The entire thing was made to carry out generic masses, rituals of Faith, or help to produce Blessed Unctions and minor potions to heal the sick or repel darkness from a home. Quite a bounty, and also a priceless collectible.

Harry was overtaken by emotions for a good long while as he sat there, trying to see through his tears as he thought of the macabre appearance of the floating Vordak Lord when compared to the entity's golden heart and kind soul. Just like the house-elves, it seemed that humanity's obsession with beauty had more to do with primping one's own image than fairly evaluating others, especially different species and races. Well, Harry wouldn't let all these gifts go to waste. Not only were they magical, they were also part of what he considered his extended family, so he would use them and remember the kind people they came from each time he invoked a Celestial or cast a spell. Also, once he managed to reach Gringotts, he would see if he couldn't spiritually adopt the lesser houses into either Potter or Peverell to give them an extension on their lives and recognition amongst the living. For all they had done, these good souls deserved no less, and they were certainly more kin to him than the Dursley's or the purebloods of wizarding Britain.

The two weeks after that were spent with both Harry and Dryskholl trying to learn of each other during their brief time left, and preparing for the inevitable arrival of the police and CPS who would at some point be warned that yet another bastard had been found in Van Uttebatten's academy, as had happened so many times before. Except this time the man would be dead since long enough to stink-up the place, and that would lead to interesting questions. Maybe they really would have a new principal sometime after the Christmas break. A child could hope.

{ HP } --- { Posthumous motherly gift } --- { HP }

It was a good thing that Dryskholl had been able to use his unstable magic to travel to Gringotts to take contact with and encounter Harry's account manager with an introduction letter to be delivered in person. The goblin was pleased by the human boy's initiatives and stubbornness, both traits favored by Goblinoid culture. Therefore he quickly instructed Harry to buy a secured Gringotts mailbox to process all his normal payments or withdrawals without needing to visit Diagon Alley just to get some spare change. The box would teleport from itself to one of those other boxes set into the dial on the cover; fill the box, pivot the dial and press the button. Simple, efficient and safe at all times since nobody had ever found a way to intercept the signal. It would also make staying in contact easier, once the elf's imminent death occurred, which the manager could feel happening when the servant visited his office.

With the enchanted mailbox now safely ensconced in their shared room's work table, Harry received a bank services' list, an instruction booklet for vault users, and a few forms to sign for getting the appropriate Noble House services reestablished under his name. One such important service was that he got to have an enchanted portable mirror, with a tabletop stand aside, that served as video-conference screen for talking to the goblin manager in real-time. The communications having gotten much more personal, Harry was able to understand the persons and culture of Gringotts easier, therefore get things done much faster than whatever the old Manipulator expected.

Despite being only 15 years old when she set several huge events in motion, Lily had already lived through bullying and cruelty inside Hogwarts which was supposed to be the safest place in the UK and Commonwealth, but she saw the lie for what it was. The Slytherin's were not the only ones indulging in systemic bullying or casual bigotry against the new-blood wizards that had just learned of magic at age 11, just like she did. If there was a truism, it was that "In war there are no civilized men, only savage beasts bent on surviving that have managed to do so".

It was why Harry had a good pile of money in magical currency that had been set up under a different name than Harry Potter by his mother, who had severe doubts about 'The Light of Wizarding Britain' and his much vaunted 'Greater Good' that nobody knew anything about. Lily Evans had set up an anonymous low-security Pureblood Retiree's vault, but without tax exemptions so that herself or Harry could access it at any age or period without raising questions. It showed in the Gringotts and Ministry records as an old yeoman painter of magical portraits stashing money away from his contract-bride and layabout kids, so that nobody paid attention.

In reality, Lily had put in that anonymous vault's safety all the originals from her own records; birth certificate, parents' marriage certificate, muggle diplomas, British passport, Hogwarts OWL and NEWT diplomas and mastery acceptance letters. Then there were the magical marriage license for her & James, Harry's birth certificate, and both godparents' blood-oath letters, notarized by Gringotts and wizarding CPS. As an interesting note were the Heritage Ritual and Legacy Spell results she had received at age 11 upon entering the Wizarding World. They were eye-opening in terms of skills, Talents and Gifts, but unfortunately the Evans was no lineage to speak of, not even squibs, as far back as the tests could go with 13 drops of blood. Besides these intensely emotional papers were an Evans photo album, a photocopy of her driver's license and Cokeworth public library membership. Then she had neatly stacked the more banal school notes, homework, term projects and test papers, as well as several spell-books or antique scrolls of lores that the Ministry in general, and Dumbledore in particular, frowned on when it wasn't them who held the texts.

The capital thing she had stashed was the sub-dimensional 10 compartment trunk she had been preparing since she took her OWL's because she was already on the short list for Mastery classes in potions, alchemy and healing. Lily Evans had been choosing and commissioning this trunk from a master craftsman in Diagon when the First Blood War of Britain was in the preliminary phase, so she put a lot of defensive planning and forethought in the design. She had been personally targeted by the Death-Eater postulants since third year, and had been approached by none other than Lucius Malfoy himself in seventh year, to see if she wouldn't change sides. Voldemort himself had decreed that she would be granted a generous patronage from the noble Pureblood House of her choosing in their group of allies, and have his Lordly protection too. In the memories of anybody at the time, only a handful of persons had ever seen Voldemort extend such a magnanimous offer

Lily's customized trunk held the following rooms;

A full laboratory for brewing potions, alchemy, enchanting or Ember-smithing.

A hybrid surgery for muggle medicine & magical healing, with floo registered under another fake name. There was also a portkey reception plate and a decontamination cistern to fight the corruption of dark magicks resulting from combat or failed experiments.

A vivarium for lab-test animals & familiars, with five cattle stalls and 24 large dog cages. As a necessity, this area also had a butchering room with walk-in meat locker, a feed silo and trash mulcher to recycle the animals' wastes into compost for the greenhouse. Two of the cages had a copper nameplate that read 'Padfoot' and 'Moony' while one stall had 'Prongs' engraved on a tin cowbell hanging from a leather collar. On a worktable a much smaller cage with an exercise wheel had 'Wormtail' written in sloppy manuscript on the plastic cover. Several wooden perches for mail birds were hung on the wall near the entry, and one beautifully engraved bar had the name 'Untamed Shrew' on it.

A large segmented greenhouse for plants from every geography, and a few extra-planar zones. The segments were set up like small walkable gardens with stone benches & tables, fountains, water troughs, small cut-stone hearths to give light and heat where needed, or glowing blue rocks that generate chill otherwise. In the darkness areas for nocturnal or subterranean plants, the paths were lit by small glowing moonstones set into the sides of the flagstones. These chambers were used as much for potions components, food crops or spices, and meditative area to walk in peace to clear one's mind. Two small areas dedicated to cutting, processing and packing the vegetals had been placed out of the way and hidden behind decorative walls of living plants.

A large, airy workshop for multiple crafts; forge & kiln combo, grinding stone wheel, pottery wheel, small lumber mill, and many muggle power tools that had been rebuilt with an integrated adapter for using Primal Essaence drawn from an Arinyark capacitor though crystal cables.

A large study separated between the desks, tables & lecterns, the shelf-stacks and curio cabinets, the conference table for 12 seats, and the owner's portable walk-in vault, crafted and installed by Gringotts goblins for a steep fee. The vault held a secured mailbox, a charmed coin bag chained to the wall, and a large communication mirror mounted to a fixed frame on the fold-down desk. It was in this vault that Harry found notarized copies of the testaments of his parents, grand-parents, and great-grand-parents, plus the family tree each had submitted for their betrothal rite. While most of the Last Wills had been executed, those for Lily & James had clearly been blocked. Plus, the genealogy and Letter Patent for each godparent was here as well, on top of th other copies Harry ha found in the Retiree's vault at Gringotts proper.

A furnished apartment that had four bedrooms with en-suite, each large enough for two bunk beds or a large Queen-size, a full kitchen with 6-seat brunch counter on the island, a huge walk-in pantry with four large fridges and four shelf-stacks, a dining room & living room that can seat 24 large adults in each zone, and finally two public powder rooms.

A generic ritual room designed and built to archmage - class levels and needs, but without any specialties as Lily had not needed them yet. Those job-specific accouterments would have been selected and installed later, once she had passed her mastery exams at the Ministry, but was still in the waiting to get certified by the guilds. Also, if she were offered an apprenticeship, her master would have to help in the design and crafting of the ritual chamber so it fit what he would teach her. However, the chamber already held Lily's familial shrine, a cleansing cistern, a tabernacle & altar combo for religious ceremonies, five braziers, several man-sized wall mirrors for Gateway spells, and many hooks & chains dangling from the ceiling to hold scrolls, books or anything else during the castings.

The last feature of the trunk was two small climatized warehouses that each had a communal bathroom so they could be converted into emergency dorms with eight bunk beds (3 high = 24 cots) per room to house mass casualties from the war, when things got bad.

The biggest emotional shock for Harry was when he found that his mother had taken the time, effort and expenses to commission linked copies of the magical portraits of herself, James, his parents Charlus and Dorea, and his grand-parents Fleamont and Euphemia. The new frames were crafted blank and put in each room of the trunk whence they were hooked up. This allowed the occupants to have a familiar presence in the entire trunk if they were devoid of living companionship, like during long study sessions for the NEWT's or mastery exams & guild certifications. It also served to stave off depression or self-neglectful behavior if the persons staid inside the trunk too long, as there were no windows or contacts with the exterior other than the entry flap and the magical transports; floo, portkey and mirror gate.

On top of the loose money that had accumulated in Lily's vault from her unused wife's allowance and motherhood stipend as per Pureblood Custom, Harry thought that getting all those documents and trunk full of usable tools made all the trouble of contacting Gringotts worth every moment. It had also made learning practical magic much faster since the trunk was fully warded against the Ministry's Trace and 'Darkness' Monitoring grid, unplottable, undetectable, and had an Evans blood-ward that was specifically programmed to repel any unknown entities, including house-elves, phoenixes and summoned creatures. Transit spells like Apparition, Portal and elf-blinking were warded against, and redirected the being towards the White Council in Edinburgh to let the venerable castle's warding handle the rest of the disposal.

Yes, Lily had a nasty temper; Harry came by it honestly, it seemed.

Likewise, Lily had accidentally found out about Dumbledore poisoning people all around, including her and her toddler son, so she had devised a ward programmed to either repel foreigners who had such potions in them, or if they were in the 'Pass' list, jolt their biology to help them shake-off the drugs and compulsions. If Harry hadn't undergone the Awakening, the ward would have done about a quarter of the job, and as it was it did still give him a boost every time he went inside or left.

The trunk had immediately become Harry and Dryskholl's permanent dwelling and work space, letting them sleep peacefully much better than just the Blessed room left by the Van Uttebatten. It would take Harry several weeks to do a complete tour and inventory of the trunk, even with the help of the amazing house-elf at his side. However, there was always a new item or subject to study, and never enough time for it all. Lily had left a self-updating journal in the study, and she had written about trying to find a time-turner or temporal dilation anchor to create a 'more time' bubble for at least the study, but she had never managed to find one, let alone for sale.

Harry's continuing education via house-elf

(Harry Potter - theme)

1986  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

Dryskholl was parsimonious with his magic by necessity to stay alive, but not avaricious; he spent it wisely on things that would have a long-term impact for the child, even once he was gone, like remodeling the concrete hall with a pair of hearths, and making a better access to the underground tunnels than just the hatch and shaft it had been. He had also spelled a quick and dirty tunnel between the diverse parts of the school campus so that Harry and himself could walk around under everybody's feet without fear of discovery.

As they worked on the scriptural anchors for the wards around their new shared abode, Harry showed genuine interest in those arts and crafts that Dryskholl used to set things in place. Since the child asked the right questions with a polite manner but the wide-eyed gaze that spoke of true appreciation, the elfling immediately began to break the racial Taboo. It had been programmed into the minds of the house-elves that their magic was inferior and undesirable to that of humans, and to always affirm this aloud, especially if infants or children asked for explanations. Instead of blithely repeating the Taboo as instructed, Dryskholl fought against the ghost of the old Originator's bigotry just like he did against Dumbledore. After a few hours of mental effort, the sick elf was able to reclaim his autonomy to such degree that he started to teach everything he could say about his species and abilities to his young human friend.

He started teaching Harry the few limited powers that the other elves had shown him, a poor selection since all his instruction had already been shoddy from birth when his parents had seen how sick and fragile his body was. Yet, those few powers that Harry learned were a great, permanent benefit to him because neither required any components to activate, all were silent, wandless, and no human ward or sensor was ever programmed to feel them. In fact, only the wizard hospital St-Mungo's and the diverse magical bank buildings had ever bothered to install such monitoring wards. That meant that even the Magical Ministry of Wizards and the much vaunted White Council of Magic could easily be penetrated by lowly house-elf magic without triggering any alarms or getting attention.

The so-called 'limited' list of 10 skills and Talents that Dryskholl could teach Harry were:

House-elven Scriptures; a mix of skills & runes, this was similar to the same scriptural magicks used by other species but based upon the artificial tongue that the Originator had conceived for his slaves. By his Mandate, this tongue was specifically created as a shorthand, not a completely elaborated language because he didn't want his minions to have an education equal to the real elves, and must never be superior to humans. Still, this reduced set of characters, numbers and icons quickly proved to be just as powerful as all the other runic tongues known. Being able to use this language would allow Harry to have a secret code to cast his spells or program passwords into his wards that nobody would breach unless they were house-elves. Because of the bigotry of most species, none had ever thought of integrating this secret language into translation spells or items that were commonly available for moderate sums of money, so it was still secret.

House-elven Wards; a mix of skills & spells that create very quick but short-lived wards for purely defensive or utilitarian purposes. Basically absorption, deflection, repulsion, alarm, detection, identification, and suppression of one event or item like fire or fuel. Potent because while the range covered is only 15' x 15' x 15', the effect happens as soon as the caster wills it, thus almost always surprising the enemy/event being repelled. However, unless the ward scheme is anchored to scriptures or a Blood Tithe device, the energy field will collapse inside of an hour.

Shaping-Fingers; a Talent that can be taught but needs skills to be used properly. It allows the caster to create small bursts of pure energy around his fingertips to either manipulate parts into moving correctly or shaping raw materials into the device pieces desired. Because this demands both a lot of knowledge about mechanics and engineering for some things, and artistry for other things, the level of capacity varies according to the training and effort the user puts into developing the actual Talent and all the necessary skills that it imitates or complements. Any elf trained in gardening or herbology will use this ability to heal or splice the plants, as well as when they are preparing the components for mixing or brewing potions. Likewise, any elf trained for veterinary or humanoid medicine will use this ability to replace several scalpels, retractors, needles, and sutures as they move, open or seal, and sometimes shape, the damaged tissues or bones of the patient.

Sense Needs; One of the most basic Talents of the species, it allows the elf to know instinctively the needs of all the beings present in a determined area which is the estate of his master, plus a floating area of 500 feet around themselves. For Harry, he will only ever have a floating zone limited to 100 feet around himself. However, like with the elves, he will have it active even when asleep, which is capital. For the elves, this Talent not only allows them to be the best butlers, valets, maids or farmhands possible, it also allows them to KNOW what the entities around them want, even when they are spelled, drugged, mentally ill or physically brain-damaged. This means that house-elves always know when people are evil, violent, dishonest, thieves, want to sell bad merchandise or kidnap their masters or kin. Likewise, elves can feel a being's basal needs like hunger or satiety, fear & panic, curiosity, safety or satisfaction for the results of a task. This is the species first line of defense in figuring out whether a master has gone insane, wants to harm them or sell them, and if it is time to run for their lives by breaking the Bond from their side of things, which YES it can be done, for a drastic, hurtful price.

Auto-Inventory of Estate; a Talent that depends on the elf's ability to interface with and read the wards around an estate or public domain. This in turn depends on whether the elf was ever tagged or keyed into said ward schema. The good thing is that most human wards have gaping holes in them that were designed specifically to let both the owner's elves and those of high rank visitors easily access and manipulate the data flow, but not the active functions. If Harry can find a way to tag & read a ward scheme, he could probably cover an entire building the size of a medium house, or up to 150' x 150' x 150' in total zone. The Talent allows to KNOW of every bit of inert and living 'property' or 'tradable goods' in the area, and write that inventory with locations, owners' identities and supposed value into the caster's mnemonics module.

Call/Send Property; this Talent allows the elf to make appear near himself or send to their proper storage place any 'property' that was tagged by the Auto-Inventory Talent. Harry will have the same limit as with the other, meaning a maximum range of 75 feet from himself, and a limit of up to 3' x 3' x 3' of materials, or entities for livestock.

Heirloom Vault Access; a Talent that was initially made solely for the Originator to use his elves to manage and clean his numerous secret caches of artifacts, monies and laboratories where the more inhumane experiments were conducted. When he began gifting or trading the elves, one mage wanted a slave that could access his secret harem hidden inside a mystical gem, while the Popesh of the local sect wanted a guard that could go fetch holy relics without physically opening the Faith seals and priest locks on the armored doors. The Originator then decided to add to his creations a capacity for open-ended attunement where the builders of wards and vaults would create a specific Power frequency that would allow the elves to log-in their name and access rights to be allowed passage in a way that even the human employees would never be. This means that as of nearly 5,000 years back, all magical banks, churches or temples, schools, hospitals and public governance edifices have been built with this in mind, even Gringotts. This of course creates a massive gaping weakness in the ward scheme of any institution or home as the access registers are rarely audited, and when they are the owners never look at which elf did what or why unless they are specifically told that a house-elf was the suspect to investigate.

Discretion Vs Anything; an automatic Gift that requires neither skills nor learning as it is an aura of magick that radiates up to 3 feet around the caster. The aura makes the being invisible, odorless, soundless, and reduces all traces of his passage in an area by 25%, thus making it very hard to detect the being's movements even when actively searching. However, the aura has two very clear weaknesses: it does not block thermal scans and does not hide the elf's soul, thus allowing for True Sight, Shen Power Sight, the Presence-type of spells and most psionic skills to pass right through. Likewise, mundane mechanical pressure sensors in the structure of a building will register the general position and movements of a house-elf. For Harry, the Talent can be leaned at full strength without differences.

Kinetic Bulwark; a basal spell cast at 'interrupt' speed that creates a simplistic quarter-dome shield of pure wild Primal Essaence which can deflect both physical and energetic attacks. The shield is roughly twice the caster's height in dimensions and bluish. It is emitted by the hands and the caster is pretty much crippled while he casts this spell as the shield will collapse the moment that he does not have both hands concentrated on maintaining it. This renders the learning of wandless / gesture-less sorceries, prayers, mind magic and psionics a must for using this safely.

Grand Sweeps; a basal spell, the effect consists of a wide wave of Primal Essaence forcefully 'pushing' against all materials & beings in the zone. It is usually employed to clean away a large area from crude and worthless detritus like garden scraps or farm wastes, but it can also be used to do a drastic clean-up after a fire or flood if all you want is a bare-bones structure. The caster must be careful about the building's finishing (decorative) layer as the spell can and will strip down everything to the cement, stones or wooden boards if kept on long enough. One other most useful tactic for this spell is to repel enemies that try to attack or crowd-in the caster as they will be moved backwards quite rudely and dramatically. The area covered by one casting is usually a cone of 25 feet length by 12 feet width maximum.

Most of the Talents or Gifts that Dryskholl could not teach depended on the house-elves' specific sort of magicks, or were programmed directly into their genome, thus making them akin to an extra organ or limb. Likewise, these effects could not be easily replicated by simple skills or tools due to the source of energy used, or the Power frequencies concerned. Because the Originator had consorted with Fae of various kinds as well as daemons and elementals to try and find solutions to some of his more esoteric questions about alchemy, the man had needed to learn about the multiple planes and dimensions. As a way to both boost his servants while also making it impossible for any to replicate his creations, he had encoded certain Talents or Gifts into the genetics and cellular memory of the species that needed to employ the energy of the connective demi-planes or elemental dimensions. That also gave him the perfect tool to control his minions as blocking access to these other Realms was relatively easy with fixed wardstones or mobile 'Forbiddences' engraved into small Ember crystals. While Harry may never be able to wield these magical effects himself, Drsykholl taught him their lore so he could know the full strength and limits of any house-elf he encountered after his death.

The 8 Powers that Dryskholl could NEVER be able to teach Harry were the following;

House-elven Gestalt; a mind magic & psionic interlink between all house-elves alive that creates a passive hive-mind that transfers information only during the elves' sleep cycle. It depends on a set of glands and ganglia in the brains of the elves to function, and is entirely automated. The goal of this was to allow for the smooth transition of tasks and inventories from one work shift to the other without needing the master's involvement, or the installment of an elf to the job of foreman. This happened anyways when the estate had more than 7 elves in residence as it was in their nature to split into work teams of 6 maneuvers and one leader.

House-elven Ward-Tap; a Gift that was and is still quite illegal if any government or church were ever to be told of it. In fact, it might be the one reason why any large organization of magicals could want to genocide the servile species that many depended upon. A house-elf has a biologically anchored capacity to automatically detect, caress, and adapt to the frequency of any wards that are less reactive than Siege Wards, or less violent than Warfare Wards. That means that most household and commercial wards in existence have no built-in way to keep a house-elf from tagging and adapting to them to pass through as if they were using the front door with the proper key and alarm code. This capacity is used instinctively in junction with Heirloom Vault Access and the flaw that most humanoids have integrated to their schemes without realizing the tactical gravity of the defect they were normalizing.

House-elven Power Metabolization; the genetic and psionic capacity of the elves to receive and absorb ANY energies into their bodies while automatically passing the currents through glands that will change the Realm, Polarity and Frequency to a set that is proper to feed their core. The second half of this Gift is that the elf can reverse the process to transfer his own magic to any magical entity or device when the need arises. And yes, the Originator had wanted his minions to be usable as living batteries and charging stations for his various alchemic tools and wards when he traveled away from the safety of his domain. While most of the sentient species would look askance upon accepting a Power transfer from a house-elf for various reasons of bigotry, ethics or the refusal to endorse the creation of slaves, the elves have always seen this function as just another job their bodies do from birth, thus associate little emotion to it, like eating & excreting.

Phase Shifting; a genetically encoded Talent that allows the elf to render himself immaterial or just modulate his physical density by removing himself from the Material Plane in increments. It can be used to become even more present thus heavier and denser to resist weather or attacks. This Talent is considered a crime in most sentient societies since it means that the elves can basically walk through walls at will without a care for insulation or defenses as they are literally moving in the reality parallel to the referent world. This means that 99% of known wards will not stop them unless the scheme has a specific part to deal with incorporeal or trans-dimensional travels & beings.

Blinking; a genetically encoded Gift that allows for short-ranged teleportation at instant speed and doesn't need line of sight, only foreknowledge of the target area. A healthy house-elf can move himself and up to 500 pounds of materials per blink (or 'pop' after the noise) and do this a few dozen times per day. For most elves, this is the favored method of travel as it is quick, easy, requires low energy and not much attention to details when moving.

Dimensional Shifting; a genetically encoded Gift that allows the elves to magically -move- from one dimension or plane to the other at the speed they walk or blink while bringing up to 1,000 pounds of materials or two full grown adult humans with their camping kits. This power would, like the ward-tap and phase-shifting, mean the death of the elves if it were widely known. But the Originator wanted an easy and cheap way for himself to move to his research camps in the outer planes, then return without having to employ lengthy, cumbersome rituals that take days to power-up at megalithic sites. It wasn't all druids that let you use their cromlech to open gates into the ethers of the multiverse; most in fact were adverse to the idea and reacted violently. So the alchemist built the spell into his creations mostly for his own uses. Nobody amongst the sentient species has ever really used it since he died as he had ordered his creations to never speak of it, even if asked directly, for a t least 1,000 years after his death. By then, nobody took the elves as very serious magical creatures, so nobody asked, but Harry Potter did. He asked exhaustively, and learned in proportion the secrets that hundreds of species were too stupid to learn.

Dissipate Offal; this Talent might look like the wizards' basic 'vanishing dweomer' but it is in fact a far more dangerous and powerful effect. The dissipation is actually a banishment to the Border Ethereal connective plane. Yep, when an elf gets rid of something, it goes VERY far away and can't be brought back, unless you want to waste a 'Wish' or other karmic alterator to do it. Or you could open a Gate to the Border Ethereal and go fetch it manually, if you have a very good magical compass to guide you to your banished items. Of course, that means that since this effect is as quick as the elf's thoughts, requiring neither focus nor words, but merely a wiggle of fingers at the targeted zone, the elf could easily banish a wizard to the Border Ethereal, which would usually mean the death of said mage in a few hours unless he had experience at Plane-Walking. Because of how dangerous in combat the capacity is, and the elves know what the reactions of the human governments would be if they knew of it, the small folk have never told anybody about how it works, even when asked. Dryskholl trusts Harry, and honestly thinks it's time for his species to start fighting for their freedom and dignity at long last, something his human friend agrees with and promised to help make happen.

Disrupt All Powers; this Talent his a secondary function of the Power Metabolization explained above. The difference here is that the elf can voluntarily focus the sapping of energy to a short range around himself, thus causing a disruption in all stable energy matrices and modulated energy beams. This means that the elf can blockade magical transports, run interference in long range communications or saturate an area with 'white-noise' against divination tools like scrying mirrors and crystal balls. In a bad case, the elf could also brute-force a tunnel through a ward scheme that was trying to imprison him or keep him from rescuing his master, or property. The Originator genetically encoded this Talent into his servants because alchemy is costly and he sometimes got short on coin, so he needed his little minions to be able to penetrate an enemy's palace, laboratory or vault to steal tradable objects or livestock without being captured or seen. After the felon's death, only a handful of people have ever bothered to learn that house-elves had this capacity, or to use it for anything.

{ HP } --- { Learning what an Arch-Lord is } --- { HP }

After teaching the young Harry as much of house-elf magicks, history and cultural norms as he could, Dryskholl switched over to explaining more about the various 'classes' or training patterns that humans, higher elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, Fae and others preferred to follow. Like the mundanes with their apprenticeships, trade schools, technical colleges or universities, it was all about giving the students an established, proven route towards a fruitful career that would give them a revenue to feed their family.

Of prime importance for Harry to understand was the interpretation what Bishop Gloutnay had called him when he had first seen him; Arch-Lord of Gaia and Anti-Champion of Hades.

Dryskholl explained that both were considered war-faring classes, that is professional trained magical combatants who were much above the average wizard or priest, although it did take many decades of studies and work to reach such summits of Power and skill.

The Arch-Lord was essentially an archmage variant specialized in heavy warfare and sieges, but specifically the defense of a determined geographical area. He used mostly sorcery, mentalism and alchemy, but will often refer to Gods and Celestials in prayers to obtain favors or informations. The Arch-Lord bases most of his decisions and fighting style on sciences and solid facts to elaborate wide-ranging effects. This type of spell-user is most at ease working from behind fortifications or with a conclave of trained subordinates, usually his apprentices. The primary jobs of Arch-Lords are the mapping and real-time surveillance of a domain, the building & maintenance of fortresses and ward-lines, and insuring that extra-planar incursions are repelled. Occasionally, some Arch-Lords will manage to develop psionics when the person has the capacity to learn them. You need specific glands in your brain and spine to be able to use psionics, so the condition is purely biological, although a few people are simply not mentally agile enough to learn how to manifest the energies. The good news was that because Harry had managed to learn the house-elf skills and Talents inside of two weeks, it proved he had the system of glands in place and healthy so he could learn the wider range of psionic skills and rituals, if he wanted to put in the efforts.

The progression ladder of Powers when one compares the different classes subaltern to the Arch-Lord is (from lowest capacity to highest);

(semi-spell-user of 1 Realm) Siege engineer, Warrior mage

(semi-spell-user of multiple Realms) Dweomercrafter, Mechanomage, Overlord

(pure user of 1 Realm) Alchemist, Cleric, Magician (Hogwarts – OWL's), Mentalist, Royal Alchemist, Wizard (Hogwarts - NEWT's), War Priest, War Wizard

(Hybrid user of 2 Realms) Adept, Necromancer, Runemaster, Sorcerer, Warlock

(Pure user of multiple Realms) Archmage, Arch-priest, Crystal Mage, Engineer-Magus, Satrap, Transmutor/generic

(classes equal to Arch-Lord) Lord High Inquisitor, Thanatologue, Transmuter/mechanologist

{ HP } --- { Learning what an Anti-Champion is } --- { HP }

The Anti-Champion was another professionally trained magical combatant, but centering mostly on Faith and physical strength for one-to-one fights against monsters and high-powered Unique enemies rather than sorceries or sciences. The regular 'Champion' of a Faith will usually refer to a member of a Good-aligned Faith or Creed who fights only the overtly declared enemies of the Cause in noble combat, it the style of knights and courtiers. A 'Champion' does not normally lower himself to police work, investigations or interrogations, and especially not torture or executions as those imply that their counterpart would be bound and defenseless, thus making it dishonorable butchery. However, most 'Champions' face adversaries of such Power and Almight that are backed by nefarious Sects that they will rarely frown on using ranged weapons and prayers, firearms, poisons or summoned assistance.

In the reverse, the 'Anti-Champion' has a job mentality more in tune with the Asian Ronin, in that he fights ALL the enemies of his Faith & Creed, be they animals, monsters, menial knaves or titled nobility with a crown on their brow. This type of combatant is a dirty fighter who understands the truly ignoble nature of the warfare needed to defend a Cause from outside assaults or internal betrayals. They are at ease equally in formal tournaments, honor duels, bar brawls, street gang skirmishes, clanic vendettas, assassinations, ambushes, sabotage, bunker-busting, dungeon-crawling and open wide-area warfare between churches or countries. An 'Anti-Champion' puts much more emphasis on keeping his Faith, Creed and Cause-allies alive than on maintaining a façade of politeness or honor during his fights, or even in social events. Being what is deemed an 'irregular fighter' by most governing regimes, the 'Anti-Champions' rarely fare well in tightly regulated groups like sects or monarchies, preferring small farming villages or truly huge cities where they can disappear anonymously in the thronging hordes of sentients.

Because of their off-the-books and honor-be-damned approach to warfare and insuring the safety of their allies, these men are usually looked down upon by those who claim that the only worthy victory comes from tightly regulated and orchestrated fights, like Knights, Paladins and Inquisitors. A truly experienced 'Anti-Champion' will detect an enemy or traitor, investigate, interrogate & torture until he gets information that is proven reliable, then devise a plan that maximizes damages while reducing the exposure of allies. Since these men prefer secrecy, loyalty and hard results over the 'flash-bang - did-you-see-me?' type of magic or fights, they will often resort to bribing the enemy's men to make them betray each other, deploy false informations about the enemy's Creed and Cause to turn the people against them, use long-ranged curses to make them sick or insane, poison the wells & aqueducts, set fire to farmsteads and granaries, attack hospitals and sanitariums to cause terror, etc... In other words, whereas the regular 'Champion' is he shiny example of the anointed & titled knight that stands tall amongst the normal knights, paladins and banner-men of the king or pope, the 'Anti-Champion' prefers to stand with common soldiers, rangers, spies, anarchists, assassins and curse-masters to make certain the job is done once and the results are permanent. It's no wonder the cult of Hades has so many amongst its organized priesthood or just gravitating in its wider orbit, like Harry will do.

The progression ladder of Powers when one compares the different classes surrounding the Anti-Champion is (from lowest capacity to highest);

(Non-spell-user) Anarchist, Armsman, Burglar, Explorer, Fighter (generic), Inquisitor, Ninja, Rogue, Warlord

(semi-spell-user of 1 Realm) Beastmaster, Knight, Knight of the Elements, Nightblade, Noble Warrior, Paladin/anti-Hero, Ranger, Siege Engineer, Witch Hunter

(semi-spell-user of multiple Realms) Chaos Lord, Guild Geek, Overlord

(pure user of 1 Realm) Champion/anti-Champion, Interloper, Lord Inquisitor, War Priest

(Hybrid user of 2 Realms) Necromancer, Sorcerer, Warlock

(Pure user of multiple Realms) Lord High Inquisitor, Thanatologue,

Champions and Anti-Champions are rather low on the spell-usage ladder because they spend so much time in physical training as well as having to upkeep their skills at riding animals, driving carts or modern motorized vehicles, and practice firing recently developed weaponry that did not exist when the class patterns were designed. The concepts behind these fighters were forged in the Primordial Era, whence religious Powers and Magicks were the only standard by which the population could think. As sorcery, alchemy, mentalism and transmutation were developed and slowly normalized into societies, the class definitions of the (anti-)Champions were updated to include them – or not – according to the base Faith, Creed and Cause of each. The advent of Psionics and the control of these capacities through rituals, drugs, implants and surgeries to the brain that eventually led to DNA sequencing and editing at the hands of biomancers, transmuter/organologists or modern medical personnel, completed the frame of reference for how and why certain classes were at certain steps of the ladder.

Since Anti-Champions were fanatical devotees of a Cause that do not feel themselves to be bound to a Higher Power besides the living God that gives them their magick, they very easily slip away from all churches, monarchs and governments as they please, like Rangers. Living alone and unfettered is almost a must in their profession, given how many enemies they can see in the environment, and how many are left to kill to call the job finished. Since those enemies still alive will no doubt come for the person's allies, friends, family and livestock to wipe-out every last trace of their existence, these career guerilla fighters have no qualms about living meagerly, in a very mobile fashion like caravans, boats, trucks, or eventually in airplanes and shuttlecraft. Being experts at causing terror, shame and pain invisibly from a distance just as much as in-your-face contact, these soldiers are NEVER predictable, and always the cause of traitors and opposing sects' falling to ruination.

After having finished explaining the many concepts about classes, spell-capacity and styles of combat to Harry, the house-elf told a bit more about the Gods Gaia and Hades so that the child could see the global picture of what Bishop Gloutnay had perceived upon meeting him. From what Dryskholl could tell, it looked like Harry would follow both the paths of the Arch-Lord and the Anti-Champion for a bit in each, it simply wasn't clear which would be first. And being devoted to Hades didn't mean he had to become undead or die to receive the initiation into the Faith and church of the deity. Although, given the job description of the Anti-Champion, being already dead and beyond physical exertion, pain or needs would help to finish the job faster.

Harry for his part had an inkling that the vordak and elf had seen things in reverse. His life presently was composed solely of the ancestral informations from his family's Blood Compact, plus the legacies of Van Uttebatten and Dhennack, all of them dead. The only true teachers he had to date in this life were a skeleton, the ghosts, the imprints of his kin, and a dying house-elf whom he would need to bury without help from anybody despite still being only 6 years old.

No; Harry thought the adults had the order wrong. He would begin his life by being in the Faith of Hades so he could learn to fight dirty against Dumbledore's army of drug-zombies and cursed minions, aiming to not only kill the guilty willing supporters, but also to eradicate the entire defective culture that spawned the miserable cunt-dropping without ever realizing what happened. He would sweep the country clean of this purulence, then burn and salt the Earth.

After that, when the war was over and all enemies given to Hades for judgment, only then could he allow himself to cry, to grieve for his lost childhood and traumatized mind, and to mayhaps find a way to heal his damaged soul so he could have a life at last. In that period of his existence, when things were safe and stable, that would be when he turned to Gaia to become Arch-Lord, to learn how to protect his lands, livestock, family and allies that shared is territory. "Yes," the forlorn child thought as he caressed the top of the closed travel altar he had been gifted, "That is the schedule of how things will progress, from now on. War first, then living well."

As in all things in Life or Death, Time would tell, but do so only in due Time.

Harry's elementary mis-education, take II

(Harry Potter - theme)

1987  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

Managing to come out of the elementary schooling's first year with his limbs attached and most organs untouched was nothing short of a bloody miracle that almost managed to make Harry give Jesus and his Bible a new look, if he weren't provably dead already. There had been several occult, violent and strange events happening around him during the last six months of that fateful first year. That, and he had already found a True God months ago, when he accepted Hades in his soul as his patron, just as he had foreseen, so looking for another divinity wouldn't happen till he was ready for Gaia, much later.

Everything had begun by his Awakening Rite, which opened his eyes to a great any things that he had never seen or understood before. Then the small, sickly house-elf Dryskholl had entered his own menial, dismal life, upturning everything so bad that the contents of the mixing bowl of a blender looked orderly and linear. Not that he would ever blame the poor late elfling who had given him so much while he lived, but Harry couldn't help but think that even when things went well for him, it was catastrophic and exaggerated like nobody else.

After setting up their new shared abode under the elementary school and learning the basics of house-elf powers that humans could use, Dryskholl had begun teaching Harry most of the lores, legends, stories and general culture he should have received. Yes, the 'Blood Compact' his parents had implanted inside him held a lot, but it was knowledge centered on the House of Potter, which was definitely 'Light' oriented and almost never interacted with people outside of the Welsh Wiccan Wizards of Britannia, their small, isolationist sect based in Hogwarts. That meant the ancestral memories Harry inherited had been severely edited to demonstrate only those things that were important to the status, finances and Family Magicks of the house, excluding any other stuff. In fact, anything to do with the Elder Darkes, the Dark/Darkness in general, the Living Gods, the Old Ways and the Forest Dwellers, and most of the lore from the families the Potters had intermarried or held alliances with had been kept out.

The hypothesis Dryskholl had about the situation was that Harry's parents, grand-parents, and possibly great-grand-parents, had been cursed or drugged by Albus Dumbledore to ignore or actively delete such things that didn't support his Creed and Cause, even from their own Blood Gifts. That actually fit since many of the memories Harry could access when he concentrated showed an obvious positive spin on everything the bearded bastard did or said, even when it was crass, inept, immoral or utterly senseless. Plus, Dumbledore was a known Legilimencer, an adept of reading and modifying the minds of people, and not just humans. When his mind magicks failed, he resorted easily to the Imperius curse, or to alchemic unctions to anchor the program he wanted followed. It was a well documented fact among many magical cultures and sects that if a child was born when both genitors were under obedience or loyalty potions, then the 'benefactor' of the fake-loyalty could curse the child for twice longer than its parents on each casting. That meant that hidden tyrants like Dumbledore had a proven technical benefit at using alchemy or implanted foci to anchor their mind control over large groups of people, if they wanted to be able to unload the mental strain yet retain authority and obedience.

As such, Dryskholl was obliged to give little Harry a prolonged course of magical cultures, histories, geographies, Faiths, Creeds, organizations and basic laws that were currently practiced across most of the United Kingdom and its colonies plus the British Commonwealth. By extension, the elf also taught Harry a superficial basis of what was being done on the continent, in Europa, Slavia and around the Mediterranean Sea since the Latinate and Roman cultural basin had been so fundamental to how Britons developed magical & mundane societies. This was then supplemented with conversation courses in the Latin and Greek tongues which were the main languages used in England for modern magicks. Older spells and Rituals often needed Welsh, German, Russian or other tongues. Harry's parents had left him a good base of linguistics for use in every day spells, schooling and business relations, but not at a level that Dryskholl thought would be necessary for the human boy to function properly as a noble Scion.

As the elf taught the generic materials that magical children of the same age normally knew, he also used extended concepts or ideas to make the boy practice the diverse languages he had floating around his memories. The major concepts he needed to learn were about the Prime Material Plane where they lived, the connective planes or demi-planes, the elemental dimensions and the outer planes where most of the Divines had their main temples. Among the most fundamental concepts Harry needed to learn quickly were those relating to his own Talents and Gifts which were known since his parents had paid Gringotts to have his blood tested when he reached his First Life-Day. Harry had multiple capacities or Powers that had been blocked by Dumbledore who was clearly afraid that the boy would break his fetters before he even began elementary school, let alone the hormonal rush of puberty that would boost his mind and magic.

{ HP } --- { Freedoms conquered } --- { HP }

The Awakening had broken the binds on the following:

Potter Family 'Blood Compact'*; a prison-grade block that is both mental and biological that keeps the lawful successor of the bloodline from accessing the magical and spiritual inheritance accorded by Family Magicks, and can even distort 'Heritage Rituals' or 'Legacy Spells'. In this case, because Harry is the Lawful Heir and only living Potter, the Living Gods of Magyck have intervened to break the unlawful bindings so he could inherit normally at last.

Anti-Faith Channel-Blocker*; a fully mental block that programs Harry to never have Faith in any divinities, no matter what proofs of their Life or Powers he may witness or feel. This is normally used in prisons to keep the inmates from invoking help from their patrons to generate effects stronger than the ward scheme or the guard forces. In some cases, when a priest of an evil church has important skills like alchemy or healing, the community may decide to bind his Faith so he can still serve the 'Greater Good' of the group in some limited capacity. Inside the Welsh Wiccan sect for the last 80 years, since Dumbledore began to teach at Hogwarts, it has been the tradition of several 'Light' families to bind the Faith of newborn babes to keep them in the path of Pureblood wizardry and magicks. Since Albus had neither court order nor legal guardianship over the child as he is essentially a Line-Thief and Betrayer, then Mother Mystra has arbitrated that the boy may choose his own path in life, and broke the immoral binding.

Archmage-Class Restriction to Sorcery; a fully mental block that programs Harry to ignore or distrust all manifestations of Channeling and Mentalism so he would study only classic Roman inspired wizardry. This also had the side-effect of making him psychologically ill-suited towards the subjects that don't use a wand or other handheld focus like scriptworkes or potions. He would also have denigrated or fought against most forms of occultism and esoterism as his mind was wholly geared towards material and elemental effects. Paradoxically, this concentration of tangible and quantifiable magicks would have boosted his capacity to learn the transmutation sciences and combative arts.

Affinity for Parselmagick; this is a mental block that affects the Welsh Wiccan specific category that is a subjunct of 'Ophidiomancy' at large. Basically, Parselmagic was invented by Salazar Slytherin about two decades before the founding of Hogwarts in the Scottish Highlands as the heart of their sectarian movement. While the greater mancy looks over all snakes, drakes and reptiles or close relatives, Parselmagic is the -limited- study, devotion and exploitation of magical serpents, alive or dead. As such, Parselmagic is on a par with sauriomancy (crocodiles) or draconomancy (dragons). The language Parseltongue which is integral to this mancy is nothing more than a severely abstracted edition of Reptilian Common, and still much lesser than the Drakonic Dialect. Harry has an innate affinity for this type of magic because what he truly has is actually an affinity for Ophidiomancy at large, which will of course translate towards the smaller, more specific studies. While the greater mancy is still partially bound, this sectorial domain of studies has been opened for use, probably because an ancestor had it in the past.

Sense Enemies; A purely mental block that dampens Harry's capacity to instinctively perceive that an entity ( or inert object too) will cause him harm if allowed to continue or approach. Dumbledore of course wants everybody to obey him, which they would resist if they could feel his evil and manipulative nature on a basal level like this. Since the block was installed only with a legilimancy compulsion, the Awakening was enough to break it completely.

Hardened Soul; a purely mental binding that was supposed to make Harry incapable of feeling normal human emotions unless he received permission from any being that Dumbledore would clearly state was an 'Authority' over the child's life. The simplistic legilimancy compulsion was broken entirely by a variety of factors, including time, harsh living conditions, exposure to the media and school classes that taught what a normal person was supposed to do or feel, etc... The Awakening was simply the clean-up after everything else.

Combat Casting; the Talent to use specialized combat or warfare spells at quick speeds without burning out his nerves or mind. This would make the child a predetermined candidate for auror, hit wizard or (field) Unspeakable. Albus wanted none of that as the Child of Prophecy was to be weak, meek, pliable and predisposed towards suicide or self-sacrifice as his preferred method of solving grave issues of their society. Any combativeness had to be stamped out quickly. Therefore, a triple-bind composed of legilimancy, mind magicks and a potion was used to depolarize the boy's magical channels to deny the inbred specialization. However, as it was the type of magick that had been favored by many of the House Potter's highest lords and ladies over the centuries, the 'Blood Compact' and Awakening together had broken through completely.

Affinity to All Weaponry; a second Talent geared towards combat and warfare. this one allows the being to use any mundane or magical device during combat without seeing his spells weaken or be deviated or mis-aimed because he doesn't restrict himself to employing only a specific type of artifacts during his fights. This also means that Harry could inscribe runes or icons on any weapon or device then use it to channel his magicks through without penalties or limitations due to the bellicose or non-sorcerous nature of the item. Pushed to its end-logic, the Talent allows the person to create hybrid devices like a bow-caster or a gun-staff that serves as both firearm and wizard's staff simultaneously. The classic use is the runic shield & sword like Gryffindor had.

{ HP } --- { Freedoms almost acquired } --- { HP }

The Awakening had loosened the binds on the following:

Pain Tolerance Denial*; a prison-grade block that is both mental and biological that keeps the victim's pain threshold at a low level so that low-powered or idiotic guards can dominate the person more easily without casting pain curses near the strength of Unforgivables. Harry's innate pain reception and sensitivity was set back to half of its normal levels, and the rest will normalize with time and training.

Innate Inner-World Denial*; a prison-grade block that is both mental and biological that stops the victim from using or developing their Mindscape, Dreamscape and Identity layers to protect from the wards and coercion methods employed by carceral institutions. Likewise, it is a way to block a mentalist or natural telepath from using their powers nefariously so that they canbe released into the community to do penal work or just have a job without the society paying for their upkeep. That is the usual method put in place if the suspect is an alchemist or healer as those are rare and valuable to whichever village they are located. In this case, Harry's mindscape layers were forbidden from installing or developing until the Awakening put in place the 'Blood Compact' which also forced the simultaneous installation and configuration of the basics. Now though, he will have to work on making it better organized and defended as the system will not evolve past basics on its own.

Semi-Psionic Capacity Denial*; a prison-grade block that is both mental and biological that was designed to keep a victim's innate Gift for psionics dormant, possibly for life. This block is composed of an Imperius curse anchored to an alchemic obedience draught coded for loyalty to Dumbledore's view of the Welsh Wiccan society. It makes the victim think that all mind magicks and psionics are bad, dark and possibly evil, or will lead to serial mind-raping in untrained hands, which basically means anybody not Dumbledore himself or one of his declared lackeys. Harry was born with a natural Gift established at 'semi-psionic' that means roughly half of what a True Psionicist could learn and command. While he would never delve into the greater mysteries of the mind and soul, or go into mind-healing, he could still use several of the body-boosting skills and combat or warfare capacities. The bind is still partial though, thus cutting off about two thirds of what he could reach if he trained seriously and methodically, but at least he can now invest in a few skills and have a usable product at the end of the training period.

Battle Trance; this Talent is a well known trait of the House Potter's higher echelons, as they tend towards jobs like auror and hit wizard. It is the capacity to perceive the flow of Reality and battle at a slow, methodical pace while moving extremely fast, oftentimes faster than those around the user. This Talent also temporarily boosts the person's innate resistance to drugs, poisons and mind control efforts as long as they are in the throes of fighting actively. This capacity was a problem for Dumbledore like all those oriented towards violence and survival, plus the supplemental resistance against compulsions or loyalty unctions. Harry will now have the augmented speed and perceptions during battle, but the biological & mental defenses against mental intrusions have been eroded down to nothing. He will have to rebuild them as he mounts his mindscape and consume rare, expensive potions to remake the natural resistances of his body.

Affinity for Elder Darkes; this Gift means that Harry had a natural inclination towards understanding and using all of the Elder Darkes similar to the Childish Lists, Ancient Rituals, Family Magicks and the Traditions of the Old Ways. In many situations, this would also facilitate or boost the Faith based actions or effects like prayers to insure a healthy descendancy or divinations to survey the state of the Living Blood and estate. For very obvious reasons, Albus could never allow this to exist as it would unleash and bolster the Potter Blood Compact which could in turn process an automated Awakening even if the boy was beaten down to the point of brain damage, which it did do. While the binding was partially cracked, there are still many parts that are operative, and Harry will find it hard to study the more abstract or esoteric forms of the various Family Magicks he has inherited or connected with. Likewise, he will be able to cast Dark spells or effects at an alarming speed and efficiency, but suffer through long and fastidious periods of learning before being able to use those spells. The binding is melded as part of the apprenticeship limiter and others, thus can only be broken fully when Harry starts an official training program then, after reaching several success milestones, abandons it for another career.

Affinity for Ophidiomancy; as stated during Parselmagick, this is the greater mancy for all reptiles and serpent-kind but it is still partially blocked by a purely psychological curse. Albus was afraid that Harry could one day understand Dragons better than his own alchemic research into the uses of their blood, so he severely bound the greater mancy while letting the smaller one loose as a way to accuse the boy of being Dark and maybe Evil like Slytherin if needed. The bind is an Imperius curse that was cast directly into the boy's mind via legilimancy attack, and can be eventually broken when he develops his full innate resistance to enslavement and mind-rape.

Affinity for Necromancy; this Talent is a watered-down version of what those born directly into the House of Peverell received as an inborn Gift. As children of the House of Death and Holders of the Rituals of the Great Gate, the Peverell always had a very -loose- relationship with life, death, undeath, unlife, and The Beyond. This was in full demonstration by their command of Necromancy: the sciences, devotionals and magicks of the Life – Death cycle and the manipulation of mortal remains or artifacts. Because necromancer-class practitioners are hybrid spell-users of Faith and Sorcery together, and so are those lesser amateur mancers, Dumbledore absolutely could not let Harry develop this type of Talent as it could lead to a spiritual boost big enough to loosen or even fully break many of the bindings that were only psychological. Furthermore, Albus feared that if the child managed to get his hands on genuinely powerful tomes of necromancy, it could awaken the Peverell or Black 'Blood Compact' within him, despite that Albus had blocked them individually. Due to the sensitive nature of this Talent, it was blocked by an Imperius cast into the child's mind via legilimancy attack with a password set in ancient German language. While partially released, this binding will not let go until Harry gets rid of the Apprenticeship, Darkes and Faith limiters.

Black Family 'Blood Compact'*; a prison-grade block that is both mental and biological that keeps the lawful successor of the bloodline from accessing the magical and spiritual inheritance accorded by Family Magicks, and can even distort 'Heritage Rituals' or 'Legacy Spells'. In this case, because Sirius Orion Black III never broke his godfather blood-oath and he was never properly cast out of the family line and magicks, the House Black magick has managed to partially destroy the block, treating it as attempted Line-Theft against the Heir Presumptive. To release the rest, Harry would have to undergo the simple 'Confirmation Rite' at Gringotts during a visit to process the Heritage Ritual and Legacy Spell to settle all his outstanding affairs.

{ HP } --- { Freedoms denied } --- { HP }

The Awakening had not affected the binds or curses on the following:

Apprenticeship Power-Type limiter*; a prison-grade block that is both mental and biological that will keep Harry's first learned profession or career stunted at a low level of magical Power and prowess no matter how much he works to improve. Usually, the bind is placed with a ritual that needs three casters to enforce, a priest, a sorcerer and a mentalist or psychic. In this case, Albus Dumbledore did everything himself by emulating the effects of the three casters with alchemic tinctures and separate manatite pillars. This block is so deeply embedded in the genetics and mind of Harry that even killing Dumbledore will not release it. Only switching profession or training class when he reaches the allowed maximum level will bypass the block.

Peverell Family 'Blood Compact'*; a prison-grade block that is both mental and biological that keeps the lawful successor of the bloodline from accessing the magical and spiritual inheritance accorded by Family Magicks, and can even distort 'Heritage Rituals' or 'Legacy Spells'. In this case, Dumbledore used the Elder Wand which is in fact the Lord Peverell's Halberd in its idle format, when it is used by unworthy hands but was somehow conquered by that person. Due to using an heirloom that links directly to the Peverell Throne, Albus was able to bypass the wards that keep someone outside of the house hierarchy from committing just that crime. Harry would probably be able to break this binding if he unites all three Peverell Relics, but only after the Apprenticeship and Darkes Limiters have also been ridden of, otherwise he would lack power against Dumbledore's combined potion & curse stratagem.

Maternal Lineage Denial*; a prison-grade block that is both mental and biological that keeps the lawful successor of the bloodline from accessing the magical and spiritual inheritance accorded by Family Magicks. In reality, this is an old Roman curse that served for old rich men to have a harem of breeding stock from diverse ethnic groups while making certain the children produced all looked and acted exclusively according to their own family tradition. The best and most economical manner to achieve this was to biologically and psychically amputate the mother's contribution out of the child, like a 'Blood Disowning Ritual' but simpler, faster, and could also be reversed if the man discovered the child's mam had good magical ancestors or a fortune sleeping in a vault that only the heirs could access. In Harry's case, the Evans had no known magical ancestry for at least 21 generations, so no magical territorial or financial legacy was lost to him. However, the most pressing issue was that while the block was in effect, all of his mother's kin and kindred would consider him as a Line-Thief and hostile invader in their lives, even if they don't know about magic or ignore his identity, like after an 'Obliviate'. This is the basis of what Dumbledore did to make certain Harry was abused and violated by the Dursley's; he bound the boy then set a 'Bloodline Ward' on the house where he would live to anchor the cursed binding while boosting the aversive effects upon the entire household.

Enforced Bigotry*; a prison-grade block developed specifically in the Welsh Wiccan sect that is both mental and biological that makes the prisoners incapable of feeling sympathy or just working with other entities that fit the descriptions programmed into the list of exclusions. The base rite was too generic and too easy to remove, despite being a beast to cast, so the Purebloods paid for the Unspeakables to produce a modernized version. The unstated goal was for the Lords of Pureblood Houses to be able to mentally program their children to hate and dominate anything not a human pureblood wizard for the rest of their lives. This version of the binding is inflicted via a ritual circle that holds samples of the species genotypes or wizarding Bloodlines to repel while an Imperius anchored to a generic alchemic enchantment sustention oil is used to codify the list of beings the prisoner is to exclude from his few social or professional interactions when working in the prison's workshops or kitchens. This binding is normally applied to long-term convicts to keep them from fomenting escape plots or bribing the guards for such. In this case, Albus used it as the basis for how he would control Harry's relationships towards teachers, students and the wizarding world at large by making almost everybody 'out of bounds' for the boy, unless he told him to his face or during a media conference that a certain person was a desirable ally of his.

Enforced Self-Isolation*; a primitive prison-grade block that is both mental and biological that was actually the longer, more permanent version of the 'Enforced Bigotry'. It was designed for a judge to have the option of sentencing useful people like alchemists and healers to community work or prolonged probation at home so they could still work while being certain they wouldn't fall back into the criminal elements of the nation. Basically, it was a combination of enchanting oil put in the bloodstream via injection with a mental compulsion that would leach the magic of the oil to keep itself in place. The ritual part was to make the oil bio-compatible to the species put under penance, and then delve into the convict's mindscape to program the exclusion list directly into his Identity layer so it couldn't just be dispelled or broken by quick solutions. In the case of Dumbledore, he really wanted his Boy-Who-Lived to be a total recluse and troglodyte so he used this ancient version as the method by which he programmed the parameters on the previous binding, to add complexity and durability to the child's social withdrawal and imposed ineptitude. The problem of this binding is that the more a person knows their Inner-World, the higher the chance of them finding the program and destroying it from inside, without any visible symptoms on the outside. Harry will need the help of a mind-healer or several strong prayersof mental health to destroy this abomination and what it sustains above it.

Enforced Explosive Temper*; a prison-grade block that is both mental and biological that serves to make the prisoner unable to concentrate for prolonged periods on complex, demanding subjects like scriptworkes, enchanting, building foci or breaking ward schemes. It also has the benefit of making he victim short-tempered and prone to fits of rage, so planning escapes with a group or trying to bribe a suspicious guard become nigh on impossible. Dumbledore wanted this in Harry to make certain that the child's attention span was reduced to almost zero, thus scuttling his entire schooling and capacity to learn anything else than basal manual chores for his most immediate survival, like washing, cooking and crude repairs to his shelter. This binding is very easy to install and difficult for the person to remove or break, but it does have the weakness that it must be replenished every year as the increased adrenaline and endorphin in the body make the sustention oil metabolize far quicker, a situation that will weaken and endanger all the other bindings by rebound too. Albus was using Dryskholl to give the child the enchantment oil or new doses of alchemic unctions until he decided (arbitrarily) that the boy's body, brain and mind must be corroded enough by now that further dosing was no longer needed. This means that the binding is not sustained, but it can't break on its own anymore. Now that the psychological trigger is set in Harry's mind, he will need professional mind-healing or Divine miracles to set things back to normal as standard healing potions won't be sufficient to even help.

Harry's elementary schooling – for real this time

(Harry Potter - theme)

1986-87  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

The two accomplices had grossly misjudged the ineptitude of both the school employees and the local constabulary forces. It took all the way to the first day of school after that fateful Christmas break for anybody to find something amiss about the depraved pervert who had attacked Harry.

In fact, it was only passed noon meal when the principal was asked about the missing teacher due to the fact that all of his morning classes had been missed without any custodian being assigned to sit watch over the kids' study time. The principal saw the man's car in the parking lot, covered in snow as if it hadn't moved in weeks, which it hadn't. It was when he went to the dead man's office that he found the decomposed body whose odor hadn't moved around since the windows were closed and the door was so thick that it sealed completely when closed.

The policemen were called in, took one look and decided to write in the report that it was most likely a drug overdose, especially when they found the bottles of narcotics and drugged candies in his desk drawer. Or at least, that was the story made public for the kids' families and papers.

Barely a week after that and the county superintendent of schools was being made to retire after nearly sixty years on the job, soon followed by the principal of Van Uttebatten academy who was his favorite cousin, younger by three years. Without his elder relative to protect him from the consequences of his dereliction and complicity in crimes against the children by his staff, the old man preferred to leave quietly lest he be investigated. This gave way to a slew of transfers or retirements in the weeks after as the depraved or slovenly saw the tides changing around them.

Influenced by the Blessing put on the school campus, the county named far better teachers who also happened to be much more morally-minded than those they replaced. Children who were caned were no longer beaten so harshly they had bruised welts for weeks despite being hit over clothing as had been the previous norm. Rumors about the underground dungeon subconsciously adjusted to say that the outgoing director had scrubbed the entire academy clean of any traces of such barbaric practices before handing in his letter of resignation to make certain none of the things perpetrated therein would follow him through his retirement.

An added bonus for the kids was the revision of all nutritional plans and provisions for the meals fed to the students by their cafeteria. Yes, the admin building still had a few better items, but the disparity was more one of appearances than true quality or nutrition anymore. Also, the old students' library was cleaned, stocked up to date and finally reopened in for Easter of '87.

All in all, Harry Potter was getting to be happy in his regular neighborhood school, where people knew his name instead of calling him "Freak" and "Boy" all day. He was fed, exercised, taught things that mattered to British society just like all the other kids, and was marked fairly for his efforts since Dudley went to a private primary school elsewhere. Without the pressure from the Dursley adults to make him under-perform or threats from his jealous cousin, Harry was finally able to let his mind shine a small bit. The only real problem was that he couldn't perform to his true potential because Dumbledore might come to wipe his mind or dumb him down with potions if he scored too high too often. So, the system devised was to hand in average homework or tests on easy years, but give almost 90% of his potential on years with standard ministry tests at the end to insure his transcripts were close to reality but would not scare the Manipulator.

Harry learns about magical practices

(Harry Potter - theme)

1987  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

Among the first magical concepts that Dryskholl was able to teach Harry before he became too weak and senile were the diverse techniques for channeling Faith or casting spells outside of the person. These were the most commonly taught in schools or publicly available books in stores that weren't specific to professionals or mancers. The elf warned Harry that a focus could be anything that was crafted and prepared for the task, but most societies or sects had formalized a few specific devices to make teaching and using magic faster, and more reliable on each casting.

{ HP } --- { Wands and other foci } --- { HP }

The most basic and widely used focus for spell-users regardless of their Power or ability is the humble WAND, but it has its cousins; the rod, the scepter, the staff, the polearm and the siege-staff. In the same family but less respected were the wooden spoon of witches and the switch of hedge-wizards or beastmasters. All of these are basically a length of material for containment with a combination of magical reagents to serve as core where the actual conduction and regulation of magical energy happens. By their nature, the 'Bastonnis' foci are rather generic and suitable for pretty much any usage, although sometimes the core composition will give a slight boost or resistance to certain types of energies that pass through. It is possible to craft specialized wands, but rare due to difficulty and the fact that it cuts-off more than it gives. Among the few specialty wands that it is profitable to create are the alchemist and healer wands that are longer and thinner with a rune engraved precious jewel at the tip for smooth, micro management of fine reactions inside elixirs or living tissues.

The reason why wooden spoons and switches are not respected as true 'Bastonnis' is that they have no internal core, instead they are superficially engraved with scriptworkes and given a Blood Tithe from the person who will be the primary user. The benefit is a truly cheap yet functional, generic wand not penalized against any type of practice. The downside is that such wands are usually not able to cast dweomers above Power Type V and rarely channel any psionics at all. In the large and organized magical societies that claim to have modernized, these crude druid-era foci are reserved for teaching young children, equipping squibs or used as drop-wand by criminals who will use the blood of a magical animal to prime the focus for usage instead of their own fluids.

Before the batons came into generalized usage under Roman imposition, the Pagans and Druids preferred to use a Ritual Cauldron to activate or center spell effects. While the vessel can be made of metal, pottery, stone or crystal, it is really the fluid bubbling inside that decides what happens. The principle is just like a wand, except that the core is opened to the user and gets modified along the casting of the spell or ceremony, thus refining control over the result and allowing also for a greater power charge to push the effect farther away. Another direct benefit of using a cauldron is that many people can use the same cauldron together, thus making group castings, rituals and conclave spells much easier to harmonize, which explains the incredible power that witch covens of the distant past had wielded. Another advantage of cauldrons is that they are fully versatile unlike wands. Because the core is exposed, the user can empty the pot, wash it and prepare a new mixture specifically to fit the spell he's going to cast. Also unlike a wand, the vessel can be amplified by scriptworkes or by burning special fuels in the fire beneath to add extra magical Power to that generated by the spell. While the batons have replaced almost all other foci since the height of Rome, cauldrons will always be the chosen focus of witches, druids and hedge-wizards, and the icon used to represent potion brewers & alchemists.

The runestones were a normal method of using magic back when the religious classes like shaman, witch, druid and animist were still preeminent in the magical societies, and that mixing with squibs and mundanes was not frowned upon by the diverse sectarian governments that sprung up over the last 1,000 years due to the Christian Inquisition. A runestone is simply a piece of rock or crystal that has been ritually purified of foreign energies before having one or several runes or icons engraved into the sides to for a scriptworkes program. These small devices are usually looked upon as the domain of hedge-wizards or low-powered apprentices who are unsure of their grasp of the teachings they are practicing. Usually, a runestone will generate or anchor a single short-term effect because the engraver will not want to incur the burden of the monetary expenses to buy a precious stone capable of holding at most three spells or wards. Finding small but serviceable pieces of regular stone is as easy as walking through a forest or riverbed, neither of which costs anything but the time and effort of the craftsman.

This however means that a poor person who learns languages easily and has an affinity for scriptural magicks can in fact have a cheap and easy supply of tools and weapons right in their garden, if they make the effort. The uses of runestones are almost as varied as wands, if only that a maximum of 3 spells can be put on a stone small enough to fit in a belt purse or pocket. One easy way to create a runestone that can be triggered multiple times is to anoint it with blood or seep it in enchanting oil; both processes should make a stone that can trigger three times before disintegrating. Thus you can respell the item if you use it only twice, making for a good investment of time and skills.

Now, if you don't mind having a few tons of boulder sitting in your garden or your castle bailey, you can always hire a druid to engrave a menhir, dolmen or cromlech with a few dozen to a few hundred spell-effects. The techniques to inscribe menhirs are ancient, secret and normally known only to those who have taken the vows inside a druidic or witch coven. Certain churches of Living Gods have adapted these antiquated methods to produce manatite pillars that charge faster and sustain stronger wards or effects, but not always to better results or energy management.

Cards, or decks of cards, come in two varieties; those with only passive powers like the Tarot used in divinations, or those that store active spells in a manner that is the basis of how modern spell-scrolls are written to fill the armories of churches and monarchs. Cards were invented in an epoch were over 95% of the population was so illiterate that even pictographs and icons were too complicated for them to read, and this included the spell-users of the day. The solution was to create a series of standardized images on small pieces of tree bark that formed the first hand-held cards, then moving to leather strips, then treated parchment and finally paper. Initially, cards were one-trick devices that served to store attack dweomers to quick-cast multiple strikes at an opponent without tiring the caster. As a secondary concern, a mage or cleric could produce cards at his own level of Power then confide them to his apprentices for them to use in defense of their shared domain. This was a cheap and efficient way for an abbot or lord to mount a credible battle team when there weren't that many men available to bear arms, let alone learn magic. Eventually though, magic-users suffer from passing fashions like all other activities of sentient species, so cards were changed. Instead of storing attack spells, they began to carry summonings, banishment's, portals, gates and contact dweomers. Having become specific to certain types of magic, cards soon became seen as too rigid, too pre-set to be useful in a high-speed mess like war, so they were replaced.

Scrolls came about from the needs for more flexibility and on-the-fly customizing of resulting effects than what runestones or cards could produce. Wizards researched the problem until they had managed to convert the best versions of cards from a static image to a scriptural sequence that could be read aloud to activate. This was the first spell-scroll, but it was lacking. The solution was to create the text with blank spaces for 'variables' that the caster could decide on the spot according to what he needed to cover. These scrolls were the norm for a long period of time, then were slowly set aside too as the populations having several thousand mages or priests began to believe that only apprentices need to carry stored magic. The perception of the people changed to believe that only children should use scrolls, and only until they were adult enough to be able to cast actively through their focus. Scrolls became to be viewed as homework from teachers or a crutch for ailing casters whose magical core was unstable, and were eventually completely abandoned by most communities. By the time that Albus Dumbledore's parents were born such spell-scrolls were already a thing of the past, even though the technique is widely known by those who work in stationary shops or book editing & binding artisans.

Scriptworkes is the generic name that covers all forms of magicks that need a text, number or image to be anchored or trigger to activity. The many forms of this multivaried technique also depend quite heavily upon the erudition, linguistics and artistic skills or Talents of the caster. The most commonly seen form of this method is spell-books or grimoires, followed by the runes used to mark everything from potion bottles to money coins to calendars. The second most used version is employed by wardmasters to anchor the layers of energies around an object or estate. The third variant of scriptworkes is integral to alchemy's highest levels of performance, the Transmutation Circle and Transmogrification Figures. These drawings group truly complex arithmantic equations with textual phrases, astrological symbols and occult effigies to combine into a powerful effect that will permanently alter reality. When an expert of written magicks wants to truly excel, he can learn to write upon liquids, gasses, in empty air, in live flames or other medium to anchor his spells. Some spells, like mobile combat wards, will occasionally show in their energy field or on the object they affect the scriptures of their construction. These pure energy writings are called 'Mandala' and it takes a good occult erudition to be able to interpret the glyphs and calculations under fire so as to exploit the knowledge.

Lenses are a varied group that encompass all objects made of crafted glass. This technique was invented by poor wizards as a replacement for natural crystals and precious stones that were far out of reach due to rarity and pricing. Normally, the spell-user will commission a piece of glass for the specific use he has in mind, and will need one such item or device per 'category' of spell or ritual he uses. The three best known types of spell-lenses are in fact the mirror (scrying), the crystal orb (divinations) and optical prisms (eye-glasses & scopes). As an aside to these are the cheap colored glass beads that can hold low-powered spells for a few weeks before failing and are often sold as protection amulets for the poor. Good transparent glass panes can be engraved or acid-etched with scriptworkes to hold low-power but long-term wards for the average household or small boutique, making it a very cost-effective solution and cheap to replace when it brakes during a storm. The best glasswares are produced by crystallurgists or alchemists who will dweomercraft the base materials before melting them into glass, then shape the item with spells and runic tools. The piece is then engraved and etched, with a layer of enchanting oil used as polish to seal everything correctly. Such pieces are considered masterpieces and rarely come on the market for sale unless the owner is dead and the estate being liquidated. One practical way to bolster the magic in a glass device is to fill it with a magical reagent or potion, but again that means having a sealed artifact with a specialty potion in it for each 'category' of occultism used.

Living People, Animals and Plants can be used as foci for casting spells too, although the techniques for doing so are normally very old, and very secret. These techniques go beyond the spells or prayers of druids, witches, animists and rangers. They are the province of those who art in crafting flesh like biomancers or necromancers, and those who use sacrificial magicks to power their spells. Several divinations use a drop of blood to remotely link with the donor who then temporarily acts like a wand to emanate the perception spells from within, allowing the caster to experience the world from their senses or aura. Other fouler magicks allow a caster to pass through the mind or soul of a being to cast spells at enemies through their eyes or mouth, and sometimes move the body like a puppet in a way no simplistic Imperius curse would. Most of the lores, spells and rituals concerned are kept by specialist mancers, occultists and scholars of the esoteric who will never publicly admit to hoarding such forbidden crafts. In most countries that have been influenced by Rome and Christianity, possessing any physical text or device that permit to learn, teach or practice these foul things will get you inhumanly executed.

Harry's opening unto magical ecology

(Harry Potter - theme)

1987  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

During the later weeks of his life besides Harry, the young elfling Dryskholl explained to the human child about the important quirks and resources of Mother Nature that were not always hidden or out of reach from mundanes. A great deal of the impetus from the White Council and other groups to establish the Statute of Magical Secrecy in the late 1400's was mostly based on the desire to control access & usage of these precious materials or places by muggles and even squibs or muggle-born members of their communities. Of great concern was the appropriation of these inherently magical materials, arts and crafts by the muggle Monarchs who heavily taxed the work of spell-users and tried to regulate the sales of devices made with these resources. This led to a direct conflict of interests and dominance, which the wanded casters did not actually win as their response was to flee and hide until the mundane governments forgot about them.

Most of these natural resources are pretty easy to find and access, but large-scale exploitation will normally result in a guild, church or government sitting on top of the material to charge fees for obtaining any quantity of raw or processed resource. In some cases, the easy availability of some minerals, oils or gases has caused great concerns for everybody as they are toxic or mutate the lifeforms that are in proximity. The more radiant or poisonous, the more efforts the magical groups have made to secure exclusive usage of the mines or pools.

It was a great chagrin for Dryskholl that he couldn't teach Harry about plants and animals that are found in the magical world due to a lack of knowledge. He did tell him about those creatures that were found in every household like owls, cats, dogs and crows, but he knew very little of anything else, even just about farm animals or livestock. He had been born to a noble family who used their elves for valet and maid duties inside the manor but had no farm or greenhouses of their own, preferring to buy fresh as needed from reputable sources. His original owners had been Dark wizards who practiced the most esoteric of occultism, specifically the divinatory arts by way of animal or human sacrifices. Their rituals were deeply guarded secrets but they always produced accurate and usable answers for their rich clientele who wanted the information in a prompt and discrete manner to upstage their enemies. Because of this, the elfling had a clear deficit of knowledge when it came to lifeforms that weren't higher sentients capable of holding a Gringotts account or vault.

The magically, culturally and financially important resources of the magical worlds are:

{ HP } --- { Ley lines } --- { HP }

A Ley line is basically a naturally occurring current of raw energy that circulates in the crust of the Earth on a fixed path. The current can vary in density from fully immaterial to gaseous to liquid according to a plethora of factors, including the presence of other magical resources along its course. Having an active Ley line near the surface makes for much faster and easier charging of menhirs, manatite pillars and wardstones. It also makes the magical cores of living entities replenish faster and sometimes bigger than average if the young are exposed from an early age.

Hogwarts is deemed one of the premiere schools of magicks in the world despite what the Pureblood movement and Albus Dumbledore have inflicted bigotry, mismanagement and cut entire segments of knowledge for the last three hundred years, because it sits on the crossing point of 3 Ley lines. This means that despite all the crapulence and stupidity, the school normally turns out young adults whose magical cores are between 10% and 15% bigger and around 8% faster at replenishment versus the population educated elsewhere. An added side-effect noted is that people who studied at Hogwarts then took a job in the castle for a few years could see their life expectancy augment by 10% easily. It is widely suspected that if he hadn't lived the last 80 years on top of the Ley line junction, Dumbledore would be dead as a rock, or at least not as powerful as he seems to still be.

{ HP } --- { Mana sources } --- { HP }

A Mana source is what you get when one or several Ley lines break through the Earth's crust to interact with the open atmosphere; natural raw magick that can present as gas or liquid. Usually, a community will protect its active Mana sources with public buildings and severe laws to make certain that magic stays available for the whole county around the source. In a few cases, a mage or priest will manage to find and keep secret a Mana source until he has finished building his house on top of it to bolster his own occult practices and home defenses. While most villages would be loath to engage such a person in open battle for their source, they will most certainly tax them to very high levels in retaliation for what is seen as a 'theft' of public domain.

An active Mana source is a very generic descriptive that can refer to a stream or pool of Primal Essaence, Mythal, Mana or Energon, in order of strength. Each of the Power Realms have their own atomic and energetic properties, as well as different magical capacities when used for alchemy or enchantment. The most common uses for a Mana source are to infuse the liquid magicks into an elixir to bolster its effects, or burn it as fuel under a crucible for a variety of magical crafting techniques. A few farming communities have also created ingenious devices that infuse the liquid magick with the water from the aqueduct to fertilize their crops and livestock for better yield and to maintain their magical properties.

ALL magical arts, crafts and practices are increased positively when done within one kilometer or an active, freely flowing Mana source. However, it can also lead to Power burn, Essaence toxicity, Manaesh acidity, and with Energon in any forms, violent explosions of flames, radiation and pressure waves that devastate a wide area. Some villages had no choice but to cap and neuter their source to stay alive because the element being released was too volatile or poisonous.

{ HP } --- { Spirit Wells } --- { HP }

Similar to Mana sources but on a different order of thought. The Spirit Well is a sunken pit that reaches deep into the crust of the Earth where it encounters a naturally occurring Nepenthean Rift, a tear in the fabric of space, dimensions and realities, that leads directly to Hallowed Nepenthe, the City of Bones, Seat of the Grand Gate of Reality. In other words, the Realm of the Dead, capital of Hades, patron god of said dead.

A Spirit Well does for the Elder Darkes, Blood-law, necromancy, spiritism and psionics what the Mana source will do for all aspects of magick. The well gently radiates a mixture of negative energy and gaseous raw soul-stuff, called 'ectoplasm' when it condenses enough to become liquid or crystalline. The Spirit Well is usually employed by communities as the center of a graveyard or a place of pilgrimage to the ancestors, and multiple temples will be built nearby to facilitate communion with the Divines in their home planes. Some Spirit Wells have been dweomercrafted by ingenious beings into becoming Gates to access the planes and dimensions on a regular basis, although it usually limits the travel options to Hadenshire, the Border Ethereal, the Deep Ethereal, the Styx River, the Dreamscape, the Mirrorscape (King's Roads) and Neverland.

One of the manners in which an enterprising community can monetize its Spirit Well is by letting priests and alchemists condense the emanations into highly magical and spiritual fluid that then gets crafted into diverse healing potions or ink for medicinal scrolls. If the village has specific animals like thestrals they could benefit greatly from eating plants or meat that was raised on water that had a dilution of Spirit-stuff in it. Likewise, if higher sentients eat crops or livestock that had such fortified water in their diet, they in turn will have more stable tempers and better skills at mind magicks or psionics. Like the Mana source, the Spirit Well affects everything for one kilometer around it's opening, but it can also be capped by a warded building to staunch the flow and dike-up the effects.

{ HP } --- { Floating Earth } --- { HP }

Pretty much self-descriptive, it's a variant of dull brown rock that is naturally buoyant in the planetary environment, and perhaps in space as well. This material is low-powered, non-toxic and does not emit radiation that can harm or mutate anything. It just floats with a predetermined height and weight allowance. If you want to go higher you need a motor or balloon, and if you want to make the rock carry more weight then you need to get a bigger rock.

This very rigid, mathematically chart-able property has led to people making standard tables to calculate the size and number or rocks needed to make fly certain types of vehicles like ox carts or fishing boats. In some villages, they built low-lying bridges over their streams or rivers without setting pylons because they embedded floating earth into the wooden or metallic frame of the road deck to keep it at constant height, regardless of weather. Cunning artisans have put small amounts of this material into smelted alloys to render knight's armor lighter and easier to wield in battle, while a few rare criminals tried to use a floating stone arrowhead to snipe their target at much longer range than normal, with wildly varying results.

Being a very 'closed' type of resource, floating earth does not make a good wand core or tip, and has no use as part of runic crafting tools. Putting the earth in potions of flight or levitation will produce a ruined sludge that is not toxic but certainly useless. Honestly, the only way to use this material is to tie a raw boulder to something you want to make fly, or pulverize the stuff to mix it into a metal alloy or ceramic blend to nullify the weight of both container and contents.

Back before the founding of Hogwarts, in the years before the Romans came to Britain, the Potter family had a small workshop that made specialty earthenware from cut stone or dust mixed to clay for kiln baking. The clients usually wanted large stew pots or banquet platters that could be maneuvered without risk of spilling the extra-large load. This means that Harry's parents have put into their 'Blood Compact' some ancestral spells and techniques that nobody in their family has used in more than seven centuries, since wanded magick became so prevalent.

{ HP } --- { Cloudia isotope } --- { HP }

A close cousin of Floating Earth, the raw ore Cloudia is a glowing blue metallic isotope that has a neutral buoyancy in Earth gravity. Will Cloudia can be found in natural deposits here and there on the planet, it is actually an accidental product from another Dimension. The metal is normally a dull transparency similar to the lowest quality of Quartz crystal until it is exposed to radiation from the Neverland, the Spirit World or the Astral Plane, for a sufficient period. Because of this intimate relation with the home-worlds of the most populous Fae species, human alchemists have taken to naming the isotope "Pixie Dust" when it is refined because it has a magical signature similar to that of living pixies.

In raw form Cloudia has about the same uses and abilities as Floating Earth, but when it is processed alchemically it becomes a potent reagent for Gnomish levitation engines, Orc flying barges or dye for making Elvish flying carpets. Processed Cloudia is also bio-reactive in a safe way, therefore can be drunk/eaten as a short term flight elixir, although the effect will last barely a half hour for a tea spoon of dust. Given the price of raw Cloudia and what it sells for when processed, only those without an alternative would do this since it would be more profitable to sell the isotope then buy a cheap Flight Draught that can last three hours.

As for the inter-relation between Fae and Cloudia, it is suspected that several hundred millenia ago, in their home dimensions, the first Fae lived in an environment saturated by the isotope to such extent that it was present in plants, animals and themselves. This ecological happenstance is most likely why the majority of Higher Fae (Sidhe) of all species developed both physical wings and a natural Gift for levitation & flying unassisted. For trained explorers, the presence of glowing blue metal veins on an object signifies either Fae crafting or the recent presence of a living Fae as its innate energy would stimulate the isotope to glow if it were dormant.

{ HP } --- { Ember crystals, Plugs & Sockets } --- { HP }

One of the most sensitive subjects that Dryskholl saw fit to teach Harry was the existence and nature of Ember crystals, a form of magical precious jewels that was far different from Beljuril or other classic minerals. These naturally occurring crystals have diverse colors that show their inherent Power and capacities. The problem that societies like the Welsh Wiccan see with Ember was that absolutely ANYBODY could wield a fragment of Ember and benefit from its effects without needing any magical or occult training of any sort. Basically, Ember is a natural emitter that captures the ambient energy then mutates it through its isotopes to create elemental or force waves around itself.

The aura of natural Ember is TOXIC to the unshielded organics that are in the vicinity, thus meaning that extensive dweomercrafting is needed to make it safe for usage by the public. Untreated Ember radiation poisoning will cause severe mutations in all forms of life, no exceptions known, turning them to monsters with incredible magical capacities. Therefore the safe way to use Ember is to crush it to dust and mix it with stabilizing agents, then pressing the paste into a shape according to what is needed. The large-scale crafting and trading in Ember jewels between Dwarves and Gnomes caused for several societies to establish the Ember Guilds Treaty some 4,000 years ago to regulate the production of standardized Ember Plugs and artifact Sockets to clip them on. This means that a craftsman could build an item that was purely mundane but had one or several metal sockets set into the frame of the device to receive crafted Ember. This would allow the safe and regulated diffusion of the crystal's powers through the item without unleashing radiation or poison into the atmosphere.

However, this superb technique of mechanomagicks made the use by squibs, or even muggles, of powerful mystical weapons even more prevalent, and thusly dangerous for the positions those wizards or priests at the top of magical societies. In an act of collective madness, several sects and guilds of wanded casters banded with the White Council and Welsh Wiccan in the year 900 of the Christian calendar to attack the Ember Guilds, shutter the mines and expurgate anything but the most basal historical knowledge from public libraries.

The Founding of Hogwarts was a great source of controversy because Godric Gryffindor was an accomplished Ember-smith and Rowena Ravenclaw had written a treatise on the alchemic preparation of Ember Plugs & Sockets for those students that would study dweomercrafting, enchantment and warding. It took the intervention of the British Crown to stop a war against the newly built castle, which resulted in the Royal Edict of Ember Guilds, Trades, Crafts and Lores of 1002ad. The Crown made the public mining, trading, crafting or school-teaching of this science illegal and punishable, but only under the caveat that the Royal College of Magicks was exempted from this and so were the traditional master-apprentice teachings. Only the PUBLIC uses or works of Ember were now illegal, not the PRIVATE ones, and only in the UK and Commonwealth. To this date, even Dumbledore has never managed to convince the ICW members to vote for legal restrictions of Ember similar to Britain. In fact, every time a nation threatens to leave the ICW Assembly, it usually starts with a dispute over allowing Ember crafts to prosper and be taught in their public colleges or military academy.

It was still feasible to find an occasional Ember augmented device in England, as the masters and researchers continued to develop their crafts in secret, just like most alchemists tend to do anyways. The two most common techniques to make a truly capable item were to engrave scriptworkes inlaid with refined Ember that would capt and amplify the Ember Plug's effects beyond the usual aura or contact discharge. The second method was to use crafted Ember but shaped in forms different than the standard Plugs to fit at the tip of specialty wands or tools, to bolster and refine the caster's fine control over the elemental forces at use. This was a great way to improve runic tools for crafting guilds, or make basal devices like ever-cold cauldrons or ever-burning stoves. Still, due to the purges from a millenia ago, most people will avoid being seen in public in English jurisdictions with any type of Ember, and nobody will reveal a mine willingly.

{ HP } --- { Tyberyum crystals } --- { HP }

This mineral is a solid crystal that has the particularity that it grows at rapid speed on top of soil or rocks that are irrigated by the bleed from a Ley line after it traversed certain metal isotopes or highly magical crystals. The problem with Tyberyum is that it's a hot toxic mess. It doesn't matter what color or shape the Tyberyum is when you find it, it only serves a single purpose in existence: it combusts, and usually does so with great explosive displays.

The crystal in part of the magical world's important resources because an ingenious merchant discovered after many trials that pulverized Tyberyum dust can easily be mixed with oils or coal to produce a remarkably hot and long-lived flame. This enabled the smelting of magical alloys like adamantite or mithril by lowly human crafters, instead of limiting the possibility to elves, gnomes and dwarves whose innate magicks are more attuned to minerals than other species. The problem comes from the fact that ANY uses of Tyberyum as fuel in a burner will cause a lot of gaseous pollution and radiation waves that can damage the cellular structure of living entities. While it is possible to shield the oven or burner and direct the dejections outside the workshop to keep the crew safe, those dejections will eventually wound up somewhere and make the place into a hot, radiant, toxic dump.

One of the most damaging and illegal uses of this mineral is to create cheap knock-off Plugs to use on devices that are supposed to socket crafted Ember. The Tyberyum will perform poorly and unsteadily for a short time before the energies inside the device make it crack open and explode violently as is its basic function. There are NO known methods of stabilizing Tyberyum inside an alloy of either metals, crystals or ceramics that will not react badly to radiation or high energy frequencies.

Second problem the magicals faced with this mineral; the mundanes can use it for fuel in classic piston engines or as replacement isotope in their atomic reactors. Thusly, to prevent the spread of poisonous gas and tsunamis of radiation, the mining, refining and crafting of Tyberyum has been banned and added to the Statute of Magical Secrecy in 1507ad with the provision that any muggles who discover the substance must be obliviated or killed to prevent a planetary disaster.

Third and worse problem of Tyberyum that concerns the entire planet; the damned things grow and then grow back when they are harvested. In fact, a Tyberyum crystal that was removed from its vein can accidentally grow some more if it is exposed to several radiation frequencies or some select chemicals. Many a careless alchemist has seen his laboratory overgrown with crystals, or even explode violently, because they didn't treat the unstable, capricious mineral with due care.

{ HP } --- { Promethium oil } --- { HP }

Another one-hit wonder from Mother Nature; this is a variant of normal petroleum found in the Earth's crust, but at lower depths in the Underworld segment called "Upper Dark". It is more dense than crude oil and very slightly radioactive but not in a manner that is significant for the health of anything exposed to or using the fluid.

Promethium is dangerous because it self-ignites at regular temperatures, so from 15ºC above, when it is in contact with oxygen or water. It is a fossil fuel, can be pumped and refined like one, can be kept liquid or gasified like petrol, methane or butane, and has all the drawbacks and problems of petroleum oils. Promethium is used primarily in the confection of magical lamp oils, church incense, and fuel for certain burners in smelting crucibles or pottery kilns. If mundanes had access to this oil, they could easily refine it in petrochemical factories for use in regular piston engines, generators or home heating.

The Gnomes have normalized it as one of those things they employ in their maddening workshops, going so far as to devise a method of solidifying the oil into stable dry blocks of various sizes to use as safe portable fuel during exploration.

The Orcoid populations use Promethium as Holy Oil for their ritual fires, for the lamps at sentry posts, and on flaming arrows during war, because burning Promethium will disrupt or dispel magick within a radial distance proportional of the flame size.

Amongst the Faithful of the Living Gods, refined Promethium oil is blessed for use in burning undead or cursed objects due to the stated capacity to disrupt or dispel magick during combustion.

Raw Promethium oil is the principal liquid component in the confection of Squibbing Oil, a dangerous, volatile, anti-magick poison used to kill, maim or neutralize users of active magicks. The mixing recipe is so simple that even barely trained muggle cooks can brew it correctly. It is due to this great danger that muggles were forbidden from having access to this oil when the Statute of Magical Secrecy was signed by the nations and alliances in the late 1400's.

{ HP } --- { Vespene gas } --- { HP }

Is a fossil fuel parent to petroleum and Promethium except that it has three variants known and usable by sentient species advanced enough to master alchemy or petro-chemistry. The properties and uses are different according to the type of product found. Sometimes, Vespene can be so concentrated in the ground layer that it becomes liquid and stays that way when removed from the geological pocket where it formed. Because of its natural inclusion of Primal Essaence that gives it magical properties, muggles have been banned from knowing of the product at the same time as Promethium.

Inert and radioactive; this is the basic and most common form of Vespene to occur. It can usually be cleansed of its natural radiation then refined into combustible gas or liquid fuel. This is also the lowest quality and proper only for non-magical operations like home heating or cooking, and the manufacture of glues, paints or resin plastics. Muggles could use it in cars or factories to power the motors and electric generators just like petrol or propane if they were allowed to know of its existence.

Living and radioactive; this is the second most prevalent Vespene form. It is composed of biomass, countless bacterium and single-cell micro-organisms that grant it special properties when used for crop fertilizer, watering livestock, basis for healing potions or even just muggle medications. In either case, the product needs to be cleansed of its radiation to be usable, then the alchemist must decide if he keeps the biomass alive or boils it to death and sterility for the more conventional applications. Given the possibilities for food and drugs, burning it in factories or motors is a waste of potential that can be justified only in the absence of other fuel options.

Living and clean; the highest grade available of Vespene, and the only one that is usually found already liquid. Devoid of radiation or toxins common to fossil fuels, this fluid can be put directly into fertilizer or farming water, or transformed food like fruit juice, alcohol, mixed with milk for cheese, butter and cooking cream, and more. Master potioneer's will use this directly as the base for the highest curatives and restoratives, be they elixirs, balms or pills. In more modern epochs, the potion brewers and alchemist will use it as a base for living antibiotics or vaccines, rather than the chicken eggs normally employed in this task.

Even if the Vespene is boiled and sterilized, the resulting fluid is such high quality that it can still be used for a plethora of nutrients and medicines, including Dwarven Cram, their legendary Road Bread. Boiling until evaporation will leave a green powder that is highly nutritious and a good dry component to keep in an apothecary's travel kit or survival box to craft quick & dirty healing potions, or boost food that has low quality or not enough matter to fill the person eating. Nobody in their right mind ever uses this quality of Vespene for engines or manufacturing unless they have absolutely no other sources of fossil fuels in their sphere of control. Even then, it would be more profitable to learn how to boil down trees and farm wastes for synthetic petroleum than to waste this product on non-medicinal uses.

End of the first primary school year

(Harry Potter - theme)

July 1987  
Dursley neighborhood  
Little Whining, Surrey, England

Little Harry Potter had been out of school – officially – only since yesterday evening, but already the summer vacations were lining up to be messy and painful, if not dangerous.

Firstly, his poor maligned companion Dryskholl had died last week, after a quick descent into senility, loss of magic and a three day coma. The only comfort being that he died in his sleep without ever waking again, so he didn't suffer or realize how much he degenerated. Harry also had the pitiful satisfaction that he was present when the young house-elf had his last moment of lucidity, giving him a friend to hold onto as his diseased mind gave out at last.

Dryskholl had been buried in the cemetery at Godric's Hollow, in the House Potter sector, near other honored elves and human employees that had served his family in the small village over the centuries. The child had been able to attend the funeral because he had used one of the most basic and fundamental prayers of the Cult of Hades; the summoning of Tenebrous Pioneers.

They are quite an odd bunch, these short beings. Standing two feet tall and draped in black abbatial vestments so opaque they actually absorb light around them, the Tenebrous Pioneers were also called "Little Death" or "Spark of Darkness" by the diverse Faiths. The Pioneers are, as their name says, the basic and innumerable workmen of the Cult of Hades, responsible for landscaping and gardening of all church locations, tilling batches of fresh Nightsoil for rituals, ceremonially ferrying and burying the honored dead in the plots, crypts and mausoleums around Hadenshire, as well as the general maintenance and repairs of Nepenthe, the City of Bones. In a few cases they will also help to design and build new churches and abbeys in the mortal worlds if they were summoned properly for this task by a spell-user who knows the Old Rite for it.

While cute in a droll, cartoony way, Tenebrous Pioneers are actually the most respected and feared beings amongst all the Living Gods because they are classed as 'Minor God' for the weakest of the group, up to 'Major God' for the strongest. But, besides raw magic Power, that respect is given because these entities have lived and died, and gone back between, in such a fashion that they can take in the worst War Wards or Siege Spells invented by humans without flinching, and can usually deflect or dispel anything the Exalted and Celestials of any Faith can dish out. Being small autonomous incarnations of Death-made-material means that it is virtually impossible to destroy, kill, or render comatose a Pioneer. Plus, their large Cleaving Scythe and Lugubrious Lantern are powerful god-crafted relics that allow them to channel some of Hades' more primal powers right onto the fool who attacks or offends them.

However, in a comical twist of the multiverse, it has always been the immuable law of Yggdrasil that any being who can contact the church of Hades can negotiate to rent the services of the Tenebrous Pioneers. The price is fixed at no less, yet never more, than one platinum coin per year of the Hadean calendar, which is 17 months of 50 days at 36 hours per day, or converted to Earth time, some three and a half years. So, being recently anointed amongst the ranks of the Hadean Ecclesiastes as a novice, little Harry Potter made his first inter-dimensional contact with the Faith's home-base. He quickly rented himself a Tenebrous Pioneer to help carry and bury his late lamented friend with honor, despite being the only mortal present at the ceremony which he had to preside himself as well. The goblin account manager almost choked to death on his laughter when he heard why Harry wanted to convert ICW golden galleons over to the Galactic Standard of platinum coinage which were worth a lot each. When the banker realized that Harry, the Heir Presumptive of Houses Potter, Black and Peverell had successfully been anointed in the ranks of the Church of the Dead, he had a lucid dream of Dumbledore's head atop a mausoleum's ornately spiked roof line. Just for that, he gave the boy a permanent 1% discount when converting his Earth monies, magical or mundane, into platinum coins.

Harry held a small wake for a few hours in Lily's trunk, in the luxurious apartment he had shared with the elfling, the cold body laid near the small ecumenical shrine they had crafted to worship the many deities that had helped them. Using the travel altar he had been left by Bishop Gloutnay, Harry held a short grave-side service to consecrate the grave and bless the casket that had been crafted by him and Dryskholl months ago, when he was still sane and capable. The Pioneer had opened a Hadean Gate between the trunk and cemetery then floated the coffin at pompously slow pace, which was incidentally the only speed it could whelm. As the Faith declares "Death is never late nor early, it never waits, is never impatient, and will always be ready to receive you with open arms when you arrive to your appointed Time". That meant that Tenebrous Pioneers could never hurry for any activity or reason, but in the same way Time itself seemed to bend around them, flowing differently or not at all where they were involved.

So, the short darksome being respectfully floated the sculpted wooden casket in its natural, pompous pace while Harry tried to find where the sounds of the reed pipes and voices chanting the ancient funeral dirge were coming from. Realizing it was a magical projection and not actual ghosts or phantom musical instruments, the child let it go to concentrate on his walking through the mystic gateway, his first experience in using such transport without his former parents holding him as he moved. The grave-side prayers were mournful and lonely, but thankfully the Pioneer's presence helped stave off the onset of loneliness. At the end of service, it presented its Lugubrious Lantern over the grave, granting the deceased elfling a sure path into The Light and Judgment so he could be awarded his fair afterlife promptly.

After the pitifully stark ceremony was over, the diminutive deity used its long, curved scythe to move the dirt over the coffin, completing the burial correctly. Then it waved the scythe at the head of the plot, making a granite stele rise from the earth, the divine magick sculpting images and texts on all the surfaces as it emerged to stand guard over the honored dead. Finally done with the landscaping, Harry was able to place a small reef of hand-picked greenery and flowers at the foot of the headstone, and light a small blessed wax candle he had fashioned himself.

That was the end of his first year of living away from the Dursley's full time, and he had no idea what the coming year had in store for him.

Preview of chapter 2;

Harry's entire elementary schooling is glossed over quickly as most of it is unimportant.

The first year of Hogwarts is also glossed over, covering only the bare events of highlights, followed by the summer vacations back in Surrey.

It is at this point that Dobby makes his appearance, and things get dicey for everybody, especially those who don't know what the child and elf are planning.


	2. childhood of pains

The author wishes to express thanks to anyone who may read this story and encourages them to leave reviews, comments or even flame it hard. As with any who try their hand at publicly expressing an idea or story concept, all feedback is important and welcome.  
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, the Torchlight games, nor any other sci-fi or fantasy series, movies, comics, cartoons or news items used in this fiction as they belong to the creators, broadcasters or publishers who put them out for consumption by the public.

THE RUINED PEOPLES

second chapter: childhood of pains

Summer vacations 1987

(Harry Potter - theme)

July & August 1987  
Surrey county  
The British Isles & Realms

Little 7 year old Harry Potter's summer vacations had begun with the sad events that concluded in the burial of his most precious friend and ally, the young house-elf Dryskholl. He was now alone in this life, devoid of true friends or social contacts to sustain him through the depressive period of grief and loss. As such, he lacked both emotional uplift and moral boundaries required to guide his way through the process of accepting and surpassing the loss in a healthy manner.

Poor Harry alternated between hiding away inside Lily's dimensional trunk or haunting the empty streets around Surrey, self-medicating his depression with cigarettes of cheap tobacco, hemp or hashish and equally cheap booze, anything the local back-alley pusher had to sell.

The sight of the very small, prepubescent boy being slightly buzzed so that he was swaying unsteadily on his legs had attracted the bad sort of attention. Several times Harry had to resort to small knives hidden in his sleeves or pockets to fight off perverts, leaving most with scars on their hands, arms and faces. On two occasions he had to pull out from a holster spelled invisible with elf wards the cal.38 Saturday Night Special revolver he always carried, even inside school. The summer of 1987 saw the unresolved deaths of three men of high economic standing, all found in the area of Surrey, south of London, shot in the crotch and left to bleed to death in dank, filthy alleys.

The police never allowed any information to circulate on what the media had dubbed "The Pedo Eunuchefier of Surrey" no matter what pressures the community tried. Among the underground networks of pedophiles, perverts and pimps, the news was going around fast that the county was turning against their trade, and the people in the business needed to be more careful. Pimps became less flashy, less visible, and hired bodyguards. Brothels reinforced their buildings and hired more guards, also forcing clients to leave their weapons at the vestibule when they entered to purchase their vices. But still, before September of 1987 came, another two roaming pervs who were from out of town were found shot in the pubes, and left to bleed out in dark places.

While the cops looked like incompetent rubes, and the higher castes of the economic and political powers of Britain were starting to feel threatened in their sacro-sanct right to exert said power to their whims, the ordinary population felt satisfaction that -somebody- was doing the job as it should get done at long last. Without ever giving any official public notice, the hierarchy of the national constabulary in London sent down an order to the Surrey precincts that this seditious felon who was killing their "Good and noble fellow Englishmen" had to be put down like a rabid cur as soon as he was spotted, and sooner if it was a woman rebelling against men.

Harry, of course, didn't really know about this because it had been Dryskholl that had insisted he read the papers of muggle and magical Britain every morning with breakfast. He had explained that a proper House Lord needed fresh information to make enlightened decisions, adding that only Dumbledore would want Harry to be ignorant or cut-off from the public medias. The child usually read the papers or listened to the radio and TV with pleasure, but now that he was alone doing so seemed to only remind him of what he lost, so he didn't remember what he saw or heard. He stopped watching the soap operas that the elfling had found so amusing and captivating because it wasn't fun watching them alone. Half the pleasure of watching those had been Dryskholl's reactions to the plot twists, a bit like the elf laughed at Harry's fan-boy attitude towards English sports teams. It would take well into November before that mental state was rectified.

Inside Lily's trunk, Harry plunged himself to the point of drowning in the subjects of muggle and magical studies his mum had left behind, in prevision of her masteries training. Harry found out just how attached to modernizing the mystical side of society his late mother had been, as she planned on being a combination of apothecary & pharmacist as well as surgeon and healer. Not lacking in ambition or drive to succeed, she had aimed for the equivalent of two university doctorates and three magical masteries before she was twenty-five years old. The masteries could be helped along with several powerful potions that she was learning to brew herself to cut down costs, as the brewer's skills and work time accounted for ¾ of the price.

One of those potions she had already finished and made several doses that she was selling 'under the table' to people who had not attended Hogwarts because they were not from influential families, or muggle-born under the protection of Dumbledore and the Royal Edict on the Right to Magical Education of 1002ad. It warmed Harry's heart to see that his mother had as little care for the laws of Welsh Wiccan society as he did, when he realized she had become a potion-pusher since the end of her fourth year in magical school. The potion she had prepared was one of the first permanent boosters that Harry would ingest. It taught the user the language and basic skills for Ancient Runes, similar to the class taught at Hogwarts, but of a performance caliber in tune with the ICW exams and diplomas, thus justifying the 150 Galleons Lily asked for each set of vials.

It was important to understand that an ordinary student from a working-class family would probably have an allowance of 1 or 2 Galleons per month for personal expenditures in years one through four, then about 4 or 5 Galleons per month from fifth year on. It took a good chance at a solid result from a spell or potion for most families to fork over 150 Galleons, especially to a kit bought from an unlicensed child. On the other hand, the same potion sold in a certified apothecary would set them back by nearly 800 Galleons, so it was a clear choice of having a chance at improving their kid's life or going without. And Lily's reputation as brewer and hedge-witch was solidly established, a fact proven by the client list, order tickets and accounting books left in the study of the trunk. His mother had been making a net profit of nearly 200 Galleon per month throughout third and fourth year by using old equipment in an unused classroom. When she began to use new devices and fresh components, the performance of her brews increased so much that she was netting around 350 Galleons monthly in fifth year. That was almost the same as the British Wizarding World's minimum salary for full-time adult workers in boutiques! And she still performed in her classes in the top 1% of the entire school, all years confounded.

Harry was proud of the woman's accomplishments, and trusted her brewing skills just like the hundreds of people in her list did. He took the first potion gladly, as it gave him a piece of his parents that nobody would ever be able to remove from him. It would take a month to get the full effects, by drinking one vial each night for thirty days, then the entire foundation for the Runes up to NEWT grade would be installed in his mind. Lily's notes said clearly that you could only use a single set of knowledge per month unless you were a trained mind-mage or psionicist who had developed the skill multi-tracked-mind to process parallel installations. That was something that his mother's notes discouraged before at least age 11, due to the fact it could damage the brains natural growth and innate wiring, thusly stopping or nullifying Talents and Gifts he was supposed to inherit from his ancestors. Harry did the Runes in July, and a course on English literature & medias in August to help shore up his capacity to express himself when speaking with the Goblins or listening to the radio and TV.

Second school year; 1987-88

(Harry Potter - theme)

1987-88  
Surrey county  
The British Isles & Realms

The start of the new school year at Van Uttebatten primary academy was quite a shock from the last time. For one thing, the teachers and custodians didn't each openly carry a wicked rattan cane in hand as crude demonstration of power over their charges. Which, incidentally, also committed a public show of weakness from adults, terrified of little children stealing said power out of their hands. Instead, it was announced that the county would be enforcing the national rules that stated only the principal could cane a student, and only over clothing, with at least one teacher or custodian present as witness. The days of several men violently dragging the kids to a locked basement room to molest & injure them were well and truly behind them. Now, conventional detentions and an occasional bout of cleaning the edifices or schoolyard were the punishments to be expected.

The second change was of a visible nature too. Instead of having custodians and janitors chosen for being taller than 6' 6" and weighing above 250 pounds to intimidate the kids through simple presentation, all the support personnel were now shorter than 5' 9" and under 200 pounds. They had also been vetted by the county's superintendent, and the local police station, to make certain perverts and thieves no longer laired inside their school. Another very different aspect was that a quarter of the new hires were women fresh from Uni, instead of angry old men kicked out of the police or army for a variety of misconducts. The other jarring novelty was that three of the newly hired staff were not white skinned, but instead two immigrants from the Indies and one descendant of homeland slaves brought in from Jamaica in the 1700's. The new employees' lack of aggressivity and gut roiling anger was almost visible in their body language and facial expressions, as they placidly watched the lines of children sit down in the assembly hall for the Beginning Address of the new school year.

Harry wasn't stupid, and he had varied sources of information, too. He knew that three more of the old teachers had been replaced during the summer break. Two were gone to retirement to hide graver incidents nobody in the county admins wanted to admit in public. Another was a simple transfer that had been requested for nigh on five years already, and finally the paperwork got passed the teachers' union and admins, thus clearing the way for the person's departure to a different sector of the UK.

Harry's mundane classes were simple because they weren't magical, but they weren't boring, if simply because they implied contact with living people instead of the 'unseen servant' dweomer that did the cleaning and cooking in the trunk. The boy simply didn't have the emotional stability to hire anew house-elf, even if Gringotts could have found him one in a few weeks. It did force Harry to sober up from his acquired taste for hard gin and cooking Sherry, or the costlier Gnomish Calvados his dad preferred. And he also had to lay off smoking his antique meerschaum pipe, or the bigger yet equally antiquated glass & copper nargileh, lest the odors cling to his person or clothes, making the teachers ask very uncomfortable questions about his habits or worse, his nonexistent home life. Which was a right shame as the boy liked having a good, slow smoke with his small drink of alcohol as he read through the diaries and almanac's of the Houses he belonged to each evening, as he learned where he came from and what he should aim for, besides destroying Dumbledore.

{ HP } --- { Have a life, why don't you? } --- { HP }

However, Harry's enforced sobriety regimen had a good side-effect since he needed something to pass the nervous energy from his small bout of withdrawal. The child began to visit the school's playground more assiduously, thus making the first human friends he ever had. Playing hopscotch or marbles may seem like a babyish waste of time and effort when compared to what the Potter 'Blood Compact' had left in his head, but they were in fact vital developmental activities for children to be healthy.

Harry also tried to have peaceful walks around the neighborhood in the evening or early mornings to air out his mind from living so tightly confined to the trunk or school all the time. He went to the small, forlorn pawn shop a few streets over at least once a week, mostly to have a chat and share a cuppa with the old lady that owned the place. Marigold Thismeh had no family left, and the business wasn't going so well, as the new giant stores like Tesco were pumping out more and more non-durable items that couldn't be repaired or reused, just thrown to the bin and replaced by the year's new model. The economy of consumption was well upon them, and small shops that did repairs, exchanges and crafted new devices on commission were becoming a thing of the past. Since she had less clients than ever, Harry's Saturday visits were pretty much the only reason she bothered to open the boutique on that day anymore, so it gave both a little something to look forward to, and a kind person to speak with over warm tea.

It was also the reason Harry started putting efforts into learning to cook and bake. According to The Old Ways, he had to bring a small food item as tithe of gratitude for the host granting him haven during his travels. Technically, the 'Unseen Servant' could do a very good job indeed, but it felt like he was cheating the moral point of the cultural Tradition when he did that. If he bought a box at a baker's shop, then it would be obvious yet acceptable as everything was above board. So, driven by one of the rare positive emotional impulses he had of late, he put his mind to read recipe books and cooking guides, while programming the 'Servant' dweomer to act as a tutor. Harry eventually managed to produce cookies, muffins, scones and assorted small breads that he wasn't ashamed to present to another being for sharing. This small gesture of compassion and friendship made Marigold even more happy with opening the shop on Saturday, as she wasn't the best baker. She would supply the tea and fixings while her juvenile guest brought the solids.

{ HP } --- { Young minds need feeding } --- { HP }

Another small but happy change was that Harry could now use the school's renovated library, which had been found and unlocked. The previous managers had decided that children between ages six and eleven needed firm discipline and correction to walk the narrow path of morality, not all the lefty brain-rotting pipe-dreams printed in books and newspapers. Therefore, during a summer break, they had put thick curtains over the windows and laid drywall sheets over the doors, covering everything with plaster and paint to make the library disappear, like a bad dream come morning light. The new administrators had been appalled at this, and so had the county's people, so the decrepit old room was found, unlocked and renovated until it was usable safely by anybody. Harry hadn't been truly convinced about the changed situation, but he visited the place in its third week of open services.

The young boy found brand new collections of leisure texts in the Fantasy and Science-Fiction styles that made his mind explode with wonder, excitement and ingenuity. He particularly liked to read the Fantasy, Dystopian and Utopian kinds of worlds because they related so much to his life. In particular, he asked the librarian about Messiahs, Saviors, Prophecies and Quest Heroes, because he wanted to know if there existed books on how to analyze & predict how those stories were told. The young man, a Pakistani immigrant barely twenty-three and just out of Uni, laughed kindly at the heavy-handed approach to literature the diminutive boy wanted to undertake. Still chuckling, he guided Harry through the stacks towards the section for advanced literary studies and textual analytics, which Harry looked at rapidly, dismissing three books out of hand, stating "I know those already", so he grabbed a pile of other manuals then sat to read through all six quite quickly. Despite his amusement at the child's proclivities, the young employee was always helpful, and cheerful, whenever the boy asked his opinion or just wanted to chat when he brought back the books he had loaned for the week. The relationship would be solidly set by the Christmas vacations, so much that Harry baked the young man a Yule Log to bring home to his family, event that had the school staff gossiping amusedly for days.

{ HP } --- { Community outreach } --- { HP }

The most troubling, yet helpful, change to overcome Van Uttebatten academy was that the county had looked over the statistics for the clienteles that attended the school, and found out about how many were chronically poor, underfed, unable to get healed right, or victimized at home but not enough for CPS to have the right to remove them or intervene fully in the house. The admins even found that nearly 17 kids were in a situation similar to Harry's, being on the cusp of homelessness or living in a youth shelter run by the Anglican church, five streets away. That made the county execs decide to get radical; they ordered the school to be opened from 8:00am till 6:00pm every day of the week, including week-ends and holidays around the year. The goal was to give the kids a place to eat, shower and be given basic social services to keep them off the streets as much as possible, and without implicating adults that could get violent if their dirty secrets were exposed by their young victims.

Because the county had to do so much structural renovations and clean-up in the campus, and open longer hours seven days per week, plus the new teachers, custodians and janitors, made that the budgets were not balancing. To be honest, the situation at Van Uttebatten had put the county's schooling division in the red, punching a hole in the year's financial predictions. This meant that they could not rectify the pressing problem of complying with national standards about having an infirmary & nurse on campus at each hour of open services. The temporary solution was to establish a formal agreement with the paupers' clinic a few streets away, to handle the worse cases by bringing the child over to them, as had been the method up to date. In the coming years, the school would receive the money to refurbish the old infirmary suite located next to the reception desk in the admin edifice. They would also be able to hire some retired nurses to work four hour shifts in rotations to cover all the open hours throughout the year. And, as these were short shifts spread out with very little traffic in the infirmary to deal with anyways, the people working part-time wouldn't get worn out so much they couldn't function, even if they were elderly and a bit slower than usual.

While the new constant traffic of people around the school sometimes got on Harry's nerves compared to the old way of having the entire campus to himself half the time, it did do a great deal of good towards healing his damaged soul, mind and temper. Having to be around other kids also meant that he was less depressive, therefore less prone to self-medicating with alcohol or smoking herbs in his pipes. By the time Christmas came, the child had reduced his consumption of alcohol to a quarter ounce of excellent quality Gnomish Calavados or Halfling Sherry as complement to a late evening dessert, just before going to bed. He had also stopped smoking so much, passing from two or three pipes per day, down to one slow smoke on Saturday evening, as he sipped warm tea while watching the week-end movie on television, as a way to rest from the stresses of the school week.

{ HP } --- { Crafty brat } --- { HP }

One of the small durable projects that Harry gave himself for the year was to modify the aesthetics of the Nazi dagger & pistol he had stolen from his uncle's secret stash, when he left the house a year ago. Using the 'shaping fingertips' taught him by Dryskholl as well as the tools in the trunk, the child stripped off the offending iconography easily, but blocked when came time to replace it with the crest of House Potter and his personal glyph as it currently was in his Soul Aura. His attempts showed him that his artistic talents and manual abilities were somewhat lacking, so he looked for what he could do to change the situation. The solution was simple; he looked in the books of spells and techniques left by his mother all over the trunk. He had seen dozens of books in the workshop itself, surely some were about crafting, smithing and other artisanal pursuits?

The child was quite right, given that Lily had been stuck with exactly the same problems as he got when she decided to merge magical and mundane ways together. On the muggle side, she didn't have the diplomas or permits to purchase equipments that were reserved for the medical professions. Unless she had a license and was listed in a syndicate or professional order, she couldn't get so much as glass beakers for her laboratory. In the wizarding community, they also had laws about permits and licenses, but those could be gone around if you had a big family name or the 'Universal Key', meaning a pile of money. But still, even if she could have paid for all the magical healing stuff, nobody in the established wizard workshops wanted to waste time at crafting anything that looked the least bit muggle. And the professional healer's tools were dreadfully expensive on their own, too! So, she came to the inescapable conclusion that she had to craft the pieces and devices herself, thus leading her to assemble a small library dedicated to all the artisanal activities, mundane and magical alike.

Harry was wide-eyed as he contemplated the books on such varied subjects as gardening, farming and ranching to know how fresh and reliable parts of plants or animals were before wasting time and efforts on crafting an item that would break, or burn, as soon as it was used. This was complemented by a selection of spell-books for basic crafts, carpentry and heavy woodworks, up to and including carts, edifices, and sea ships. Likewise, there were books on prospecting the topsoil and underground, to find stones, gems, crystals or metals for smithing anything from kitchen utensils to enchanted protection amulets. There books on making diverse types of glass, pottery or ceramics for the panoply of vials, jars and tubes that any brewer, apothecary or alchemist needed in their lab. Then Harry found some books on gemology, stone lore, crystal evaluation plus magical crystallurgy, even the severely monitored Ember-smithing!

For his immediate needs, Harry followed the opinions of the family portraits, going back to the study to locate a book of beginner's spell-lists. He soon found the thick tome in the reference section next to the main desk. Flipping through, he put in colored paper tags to mark 'Prosaics; Archivistics' and 'Prosaics; Library Mastery' as the first two lists he should learn. They both related to producing or acquiring data in any form or medium, and processing said data for a report, graph or map. Archivistics was short and could all be learned in one go, but Library Mastery was a longer list, that Harry could only learn safely the first few spells. Having learned those two set of spells up to his energetic and mental capacity would immediately come in quite handy when he would learn the other spell-lists, later on in the year.

After a few months of efforts at part-time in the evenings, he had passed through the two admin spell-lists and was now able to discretely use them to hasten his school work or leisure reading. Which of course meant that any magical studies he did would now progress at a fair clip, making him feel like a born-scholar instead of the unwanted wildling he had lived as for six years.

Now mentally equipped for much better mental processing, little Harry went to the workshop to find and learn 'Prosaics; Structure Law' followed by 'Prosaics; Forging Mastery'. He had thought to limit himself to those but read 'Prosaics; Warrior Law' thus seeing that it included a few crude crafting or maintenance spells too. Above all though, the Warrior Law had spells that could help directly in a fight or survival situation, like if he had to run away to a rural zone, so he took the time to learn that too before taking up his crafting project. The results he got would certainly prove his choice right.

When Harry worked on the blade and gun, he changed their colors by bathing the items in simple potions from his mum's folios, adjusting the sheaths to match. He didn't bless the items in the name of Hades yet, as he didn't feel ready for such an important step in his religious path. He removed all icons or serial numbers from the Nazi regime, made the wood black and the steel lavender-purple, with white scriptworkes to anchor the elf-wards against detection, perception and theft or losing the items. These two were more symbolic than utilitary, so he preferred to leave them in the trunk as they could be 'called' to his hands when needed.

Harry used one of the empty warehouses of the dimensional trunk as makeshift shooting gallery to practice with all the types of low-powered pistols and hunting rifles that Dryskholl had collected during his short freedom. The human child's hands were still too small or weak for the bigger models or army-grade shells, but the small cal.38 revolver was nice, as were the single-shot Derringers and old World War II Liberator. As long as Harry stayed in caliber .22 or .38, he didn't hurt his fingers or wrists, and could practice safely enough since nobody bothered him where he did his training. A few quick spells set up papers targets on wooden posts, and he had his range ready. For the knives, he used his new crafting spells to build a few almost-dummies that he had seen in films on television. These were vertical wooden poles that were allowed to swivel so that they emulated the retaliation strikes of an enemy. Hit one limb and the force you put in makes the whole pole swing just as hard towards your opposite side, so you have to either block, parry or evade. Yes, it wasn't a very quick movement, and there was never any variation to the response pattern, but it was all that Harry had, and it was far better than any street urchin or young thug would ever have access to. Some cheap self-training is better than none at all.

Summer vacations 1988

(Harry Potter - theme)

1988  
Surrey county  
The British Isles & Realms

Following the child growth chart that his mother had written, Harry only used potions to bolster his mind or skill-sets during the summer months, when he wasn't being crammed full by the school's official tuition plans. As soon as July came and school let out, he began to drink the potion to learn Latin in its pigdin, mercantile and Clerical versions, to be able to understand and cast the wizarding spells common in Britannia, Europa, Slavia and most of the Mediterranean.

This was followed in August by the potion for Mathematics, Geometry, Volumetry, Calculus, Statistics and Arithmancy. This entire system of lores and skills was almost a quarter of the entire scriptural magicks domain, a vital learning for managing his money, estate and businesses, and fundamental to all exact branches of magicks. One simply didn't go into potions or alchemy without being able to count or extrapolate correctly, and all of transfiguration, transmutation and transmogrification depended on geometry & volumetry for their functioning. Taking that potion would do wonders for his aptitudes at higher learning, giving him an incredible edge that few could dare to contemplate. And again, at 188 Galleons per set, this batch was expensive for bootleg stuff, but Man!, was it ever worth every Knut his mom put in it!

Continuing his foray into magical self-education, Harry decided to see why his mother made such a fuss about hedge-craft, potions, alchemy and healing. He could understand muggle medicine well enough as it was shown in the newspapers and TV often enough that it wasn't much of a mystery, but the magical counterpart wasn't something he'd witnessed much of. As it was, Lily's portrait gave him the advice to read a few lore manuals for starters, to get a feel for the fields of concepts and skills before he took on the spells. Her image told him that every person who planned to live part-time or more in the magical world needed to learn herbology, potions and hedge-craft until at least OWL level to be functionally autonomous. Going all the way to NEWT's was preferred, and following the ICW standards was the only way to be taken seriously as the British testing & licensing system had degenerated into a bad joke over the last two centuries. While Lily was always ready to blame Albus for all the ills of the planet, this debacle was something he inherited, then gleefully continued because he wanted the same result; idiots who always perform at levels inferior to himself.

So, Harry took a trip to the infirmary. Mostly just by walking through a door in the central corridor of his trunk, eh, eh, eh... Harry had only rarely visited this imposing, intimidating hall because he had suffered enough pain, injuries and shame in his young life that imagining the ugly, bloody work happening in this suite of rooms gave him jitters and goosebumps. Still, needs must and all that rot...

The boy read the preparatory guides and manuals destined for children or young mothers and serious hedge-wizards, then found a few spell-lists to match his curiosity. He took up the very basic 'Prosaics; Helpful Magicks' because it was generic everyday stuff that could help him find objects or move heavy things and repair better than his Childish dweomers could. Then he started learning the first few levels of 'Prosaics; Sampling Ways' to be able to harvest, prepare and accurately measure the components of any crafting or potion he wanted to do. This finally led Harry to his premier goal, the 'Prosaics; Healing Touch' which he could learn the beginning levels without risk. In fact, this list was conceived with shortened incantations and reduced gestures not only to help the rescue-wizard waste less time, but also to make it easier for semi-spell-users or complete mundanes to learn and use.

{ HP } --- { The Revelation to End all magical governments } --- { HP }

As he read through the three spell-lists he had chosen for the duration of this summer, Harry began to have a nasty feeling in the back of his mind. The further he read, the more uneasy he became, until he saw with his own eyes the declaration that made him want to vomit his lunch atop the offending pages of delirium.

Purely, utterly, born-as-it muggles could learn to employ ACTIVE magicks.

Mere, unimportant, lesser life-form muggles could CAST spells or EMPOWER runes.

The book with the basic family medicine spell-list was rather definitive about it, too. Anybody who knew how to speak, count, read & write and sing, should make the effort to establish contact with the minuscule core of magick inside their body and soul to render it 'Awake', even if they never raise above the level of a Squib, which is actually the name given to "muggles who have an active core but lack capacity for a fully magical profession or artistry" according to the authors. Anybody with better access to their core able to pass the magick saturation & replenishment rate tests are considered 'semi-user' of one Realm of magic, with capacity ranks going up to semi-multi, pure-user, hybrid, archmage-class, arcane-class, and High Harkys classes at the very top.

Being in training to become Anti-Champion of Hades, Harry was classed as 'Pure-user of one Realm (channeling)' but his biological ancestry and activated Blood-Law made him from birth a 'Pure-user of one Realm (essence)'. Together, both capacities forcibly made him into a hybrid user of two Realms, and he still had some partial psionics abilities he could unlock at some point in the future.

Blinking in utter amazement, Harry realized that all the magical or wizarding governments in function, and most churches too, lied to the people spuriously about how magick existed and who could learn it. Then the conclusion hit the child like a freight train going downhill without brakes to control its path. It wasn't about who 'could' learn magick, but about who 'could be controlled' once they had it inside them, and who 'could be reliable' to help the Powerful of society remain in those places of Power they had obtained or trafficked out of the population. Like the way Albus Dumbledore had usurped his way through every stratum of society from a very poor birthing as a half-blood, all the way up to Headmaster of Hogwarts, Chief Warlock of the British Wizengamot, and Supreme Mugwump (what a dumbly childish title!) of the International Confederation of Warlocks.

That was why groups like the Welsh Wiccan Ministry, the White Council, the Watchers and the Librarians all agreed to keep magic a secret from the muggles! They presently had something inside of them that was SPECIAL, that made them feel above and beyond the mere barbarians who wallowed in muck at their feet, the MUGGLES. Laying his head back into the chair, Harry realized that the logic behind this planetary lie was the same as the Nazis. Some poor, miserable wannabees without capacities or talents or their own decided to use the one thing they had since birth that couldn't be stolen or copied, the color of their skin, and mounted a doomsday cult on that sole premise. Once the racial bigotry was enshrined as the reason for their superiority, just as all of Europa had done since the 1400's to justify enslaving Africans or Arabs, then they added to the list of inferiors anything that threatened their place of authority, like any other religion or philosophy. The Nazis had just copied the prevalent psychological movance of the societies around them, not the other way around. The populations were already racist, sexist and ageist for centuries, so adding a cleavage based on magical abilities or ancestry at some point of history would have been easy-peasy for those who enacted the system.

The magicals of Britannia, Europa, Slavia and most of the Mediterranean watershed had been strongly influenced by the Roman Empire, who were avowed bigots, cruel conquerors, enslavers and exterminators of anything they couldn't control. And even if they did control you, if you were too dissimilar to what happened in Rome, or existed in Italy, the Empire would probably go and 'pacify' your deviance by pillaging, burning and salting the land where you dwelt, leaving thousands of crucified corpses in their wake. It was the Roman 'wizemen' who taught, then imposed, the arts & uses of 'Bastonnis' foci to the colonies and conquered victims of the Imperial armies. It was by Roman Law that wands replaced cauldrons, fetishes, runestones and cromlech as the -STANDARD- tool of modern, well educated spell-casting, until it became the only acceptable form of focus, lest one get a governmental license to do otherwise. Good English magicals were now only sorcerers who used wands bought at a licensed wand-crafter's shop, and anybody else was either a menial hedge-wizard unworthy of attention, or a great philosopher that needed costly and esoteric foci to plumb the tumultuous depths of the Magyck Weaves.

It was all about nothing else than CONTROL and being able to favor those who kept the elites in power, as long as their fragile egos and vapid neuroses were caressed appropriately. The bigotry that wizards felt towards muggles wasn't about being superior to magicless inferiors, it was about hiding their fear that their one and only distinctive characteristic could one day no longer be exclusive to their small, tightly policed sectarian groupuscule.

Harry did end up vomiting his lunch in the bin next to the desk, and then spent the rest of the week-end abed with a fever as his poor brain tried to cogitate all of the high-level philosophy, politics, civics, laws and religious history that he had just put in his head the wrong way, and without any sorts of warning ahead of the act.

"It hurts, dammit! It hurts so damned much!" the boy whined piteously from under his sheets, despite the anti-migraine potion he took.

Alas, poor child; such was the price asked for knowledge of Truth and Reality.

Change, adaptation and growth of self, or else implosion and self-destruction.

Harry would learn, evolve and grow, and be better as a person for it all.

{ HP } --- { Small criminal matters } --- { HP }

The constabulary's dreaded nightmare, 'The Pedo Eunuchefier of Surrey', was back in business this year, living up to his name by leaving a wake of four dead men, two dead women, and seven handicapped sods. Nobody knew what the crimes they committed were, as the murderous felon who judged and punished them left the surviving victims in brain-damaged comas. It was widely suspected though that these were not sexual perverts, but instead adults who had committed violence on children under the guise of 'discipline' since they were not shot in the crotch, when the proven pedos were all bled to death via destroyed genitals. The media were having a field day again, the Ministry of the Interior in London was denying everything en-masse as usual, and the local town council was being torn apart between those wanting to enact vigilance patrols by armed civilians, versus those wanting to thank the killer for cleaning their town at last.

This time though, Harry did listen to the radio and TV, and read the mundane and magical papers assiduously each day. He was even subscribed under fake names by Dryskholl to several international periodicals that carried bilingual editions aimed at the English nations. The Europeans were hysterical with laughter at the plight of England suffering the reincarnation of Jack-the-Ripper, while the Americans were practically cheering the killer in his choice of victims and punishments for their sins. The Russians were being bearish (and boorish) towards everybody, while the French snobbishly reminded everybody that such events did not occur in France. The response to French medias by the Germans and Hungarians gave Harry a fit of giggles that lasted long into the evening that day, as they pointed to French serial killers that emerged since WW-II.

{ HP } --- { Scholastic betterment } --- { HP }

One good thing about having the school opened all day, all year long, was that they had to have custodians, cooks and one librarian present at all times. The teachers and admins did the regular class-time schedule only, with longer hours to close the year's reports and budgets. This meant that Harry could now go in the cafeteria for a snack when he wanted, and could sit in the great room with his new friends to play cards or board games without being bothered by anybody with foul intentions, unlike the public parks.

It also meant that the school was taken a bit out-of-sorts this year because nobody understood just how popular the new open hours and services would be, especially with the children themselves. Then again, the types of disfavored clienteles implicated should have told them from the start this would happen. So, the county informed the families of students that, starting next year, there would be thematic summer camps held by the Boy Scouts of England, arts & crafts groups, and amateur sports leagues. Harry was now excited to see what would be offered, and how he could get enrolled without the Dursley's being involved. He hadn't seen or heard from them in almost two full years by this point, and didn't miss them at all.

Third school year; 1988-89

(Harry Potter - theme)

1988-89  
Surrey county  
The British Isles & Realms

Harry Potter was happy like a clam in the sand on a warm beach. He had just passed the newly instated mandatory health check by one of the school's freshly hired elderly nurses. Why was he happy? Because he had finally caught up to the weight & height averages for his age group. He wasn't the runty cur of the year anymore; that disgrace fell to a poor boy from the other side of the district.

His third year was going to be interesting, to say the least.

The school had modified the programs for the physical education classes to include more training in calisthenics and athletics rather than just playing ball games, track running and swimming for beginners. The coaches now had to get the kids through several standardized exercise routines that even included throwing discus and javelins like in the Olympics. Basic track runs had been replaced by Parkours with mobile obstacles that got changed every week to keep it varied and demanding on the children. The pool now served for water polo and tag-relay speed swimming. This led to a bunch of happily exhausted but refreshed and healthy kids, for a change.

Likewise, the school had changed the very basic and drab arts class into full-out wood and pottery crafting with artisanal manual tools, plus some cloth and leather artistry too. From third year up, it was workshop training with stationary powered drills, saws, planers and grinders and working with glass or plastics. Those in the last year of elementary would learn to use acetylene torches and MIG welders on metal pieces to create small statues or repair junk devices back to function. That was a whole lot different than just coloring sheets barely fit for kindergarten babies, back thirty years ago! Now, the kids got to try things that would help them to decide in what kinds of secondary classes they wanted to progress, and if a specialized trade-school would be a better fit than the local public high school that was only a generalist formation.

Given the two boosting potions for literacy and mathematics he had drunk over the last two years, plus the research & administration spell-lists he learned, Harry was performing well ahead of his age peers, but only he knew of it. He continued his system of displaying only an average intellect, character and abilities so as to make certain that anybody who looked only at the written report cards and disciplinary records would see nothing that spoke of skills, Powers, Talents or Gifts that could threaten their secret, illegal plans.

However, third year was also the first year that he had standard tests at the end. So, Harry did his usual average, then gave his best on the tests to give the impression that he was able to grasp the subject matter easily, just not interested in making any efforts on regular work during the year. His report card showed that he had literally aced all the government tests, thus skewing upwards his grade-point average rather amazingly high for such an ordinary child.

{ HP } --- { The spies who hate me } --- { HP }

Harry had become aware that there were two sets of watchers lurking around the county of Surrey at present, and neither meant well for his life and welfare.

There were three elderly squib ladies who lived alone in borderline poverty in small cottages that they toiled to upkeep cleanly. They were put in place by Dumbledore as a back-up to his wards and illegal taps into the Wizarding Ministry's sensor grid. These houses and people were easy to identify & avoid as they were located near the Dursley house, not the school campus. In fact, Dumbledore's laziness and preconceived notions played against him as he thought that the muggle curriculum had barely changed since before WW-II. He truly believed such lacking program of schooling was too idiotic to instruct Harry into ways or abilities that could threaten his masterfully wrought plans. Harry could not possibly become intelligent or autonomous enough to take on adult wizards and win, not if he had just that kind of handicapped education, so he let it be without supervision beyond the squib hirelings.

The second group of watchers was much more direct, and far less illegal, than what the old goat fucker had put in place. Due to Harry's less than savory incidents over the last two years, the authorities in London had begun to panic rather hard. Having one murder or suspicious death per decade was the usual norm for the entirety of Surrey county, not a handful per annum in one small sector. The fact that the method and reasons for killing were almost identical, thus creating a 'signature' from the criminal, had the coppers on the look-out for suspicious activities or persons that could lead to clues about the dastardly killer. What Harry quickly deduced was that the Ministry of the Interior had dispatched officers from no less than Scotland Yard to find and apprehend the so-called "Pedo Eunuchefier of Surrey" by putting the men undercover in bars and alleys, posing as pervs looking for a kid to exploit cheaply.

Luckily for Harry, the bobbies had no Earthly idea they were hunting for an eight year old kid, nor did they understand that Harry never went hunting for victims willingly. It was just sheer, dumb, bad luck that, whenever he tried to walk alone in the evening to fetch stuff at the grocery store or smaller convenience shop, he got accosted forcefully by some damned child rapist who wouldn't accept that Harry wasn't rentable by the hour like any other whore in the sector. Harry had never killed as the primary attacker nor initiated conflict in any of the cases he was concerned; it was always reactive defense. But the cops wouldn't care, not with a firearm used, and not since two of the men from last year had been "Good, loyal, upstanding servants of the nation" who worked for Parliament in London. With people close to the PM's office biting the dirt in a mess of immorality and prurient depravity with kids, the hunt would only get more intense, for a long while.

But it wasn't like Harry could control these damned things! Dammit all to Hell and back!

Summer vacations 1989

(Harry Potter - theme)

1989  
Surrey county  
The British Isles & Realms

Well, this year's vacations were better than the ones before. Harry managed to not kill anybody, even though it was no decision of his, just better luck than before. That and he had decided to use some of the house-elf tricks Dryskholl had taught him about being unnoticed and untraceable.

Why hadn't he thought to use those before? Damn, but he was a dumb human!

Anyways, as promised by the school, they stayed open every day this summer too, and the new kids' camps were in place as well. Each camp happened in a rural area, in an old camping ground that had been used for such activities before they shut down when the owner died childless. The county's school administrators had bought the antique, dilapidated camp facilities and paid a small amount to have the basics reinstalled like plumbing and electricity in each bunkhouse, and the telephone lines for the admin, infirmary, garage and monitor barracks. The camping spot was on the shore of a small lake where narrow boats ferrying coal to London and the outlying burghs went through, as it was integrated to the network of canals and water-locks from last century.

Harry enjoyed every one of the camps offered as he managed to register without any parental permission required. The mentality behind those camps was to help kids with bad situations, and keep them off the streets in case the CPS could not intervene in the home. Because he fit exactly the profile of child they were targeting, Harry passed through without any problems in school or in his ex-home that no longer mattered.

Whatever the theme of the week was, the camp was held from Monday morning to Sunday evening, all in the same grounds. The only change was that the organizers had assigned one bunkhouse for each style of camp group, so the kids ate breakfast, played and slept side-by-side but did the specialized activities in their bunkhouse, or at one of the external spots with a big bonfire in the middle for hot noon meals and evening fun.

Harry particularly enjoyed the sports and survival training of the Scouts, quickly earning some of the 'Amateur' merit badges that had been offered. They were colored differently than the genuine Scout badges, but had the same ranks and requirements to achieve. The young human performed well in the Parkours and endurance swimming challenges, then aced the knife and hatchet throwing competitions for all ages. The Scout groups were taught how to start & manage a crude wood fire safely, how to check food packages for expiration date & edibility, how to shelter safely if caught out in a rainstorm or snowfall, and how to stay warm & dry if they had no immediate shelter.

When he tried the arts & crafts camp, Harry liked the first time so much he decided to alternate between one week of Scouts and one of A & C until the end of summer.

The artisans taught the children many basic skills at identifying safe, useful materials out of junk or obsolete things, then assemble them in a practical configuration. Without being obvious about it, the coaches were showing the kids how to repair their worn clothing and old shoes by patching them with decorative elements sewn or tacked atop the holes or cracks. Then they showed them how to fix little problems with furniture like uneven legs, rickety chairs, wobbly tables, crooked lamps, and so on. Eventually they started using more useful tools like pliers, hammer, screwdriver, chisel or box-cutter. For those kids who attended the last week of A & C, they were given basic instructions on how to shut-off a junction box to change glass fuses or flip breakers, how to cut-off water lines if there was a leak and how to patch it with tape & glue, how to patch cracked windows or put cardboard sheets with tape if the pane fell out, etc... Plus, they were taught the safety basics about handheld power tools that any home needed, like the drill, reciprocating saw, block sander and rotary tool with changeable heads.

All in all, the day activities of the camp went a long way to make Harry feel like a full person instead of just a defective freak that nobody wanted. He got to play with kids in a way that didn't make him feel as he were wasting precious study time, and got to learn valuable life skills while doing it. Plus, with his shrunken trunk hanging from an invisible locket at his neck, just like Lily had planned, he had his true home right at hand all the time. Because he used 'Shaping Fingertips' on the wooden frame of his bunk on each bed he was given, he always had a rune scheme that emitted an aura of absence & un-presence throughout the night. That allowed him to sleep safely in his own grand bed inside his trunk, and not share a rather primitive bathroom at night with 23 other kids that he didn't know all that well.

The true benefit of lugging his trunk and having unfettered access to it was that he could take a new set of potions in July and August as he had done before. The choice of learning booster for July was the old Welsh language which would help in learning English history and culture better, and give him an alternate tongue for casting and locking wards. Almost nobody spoke magical Welsh anymore, not even inside Dumbledore's self-named Welsh Wiccan sect, the bloody fools. The poison he chose for August (irony, that) was from the Cult of Hades. He had received a dream at night from his deity, granting him the power to Bless a series of 30 vials with godly effluves so as to imbue them with Thanatos, the Lingua Esspiritu Mortis, the tongue of Death and official governing language of Hadenshire. Harry would thereafter be able to speak the Holy Tongue to converse with Tenebrous Pioneers or other entities he could summon from the cult. It would also give him yet another exotic method of casting or locking spells that nobody could undo for very few outside the Hadean church ever learned it as fully as he would receive.

An unforeseen side-effect of learning Thanatos via holy unction rather than the classic, neutral, alchemical draughts his mother made, was that he absorbed a great divine blessing deeply into his mind and soul during the month. Not only did he obtain one of the most ancient and revered Celestial tongues next to Angelic Nephilim or the demonic Common of the Lower Planes, he also became calmer, more at peace with himself and existence. The reason for this was that the potions and curses Dumbledore placed on him to insure he was impatient and prone to anger were slowly eroded and 'died' from prolonged contact with the Will of Hades to support and bolster his new faithful, on his path towards priesthood. The effects of such calmness upon his learning abilities and entire life would be profound, as would be the death-blow to the nefarious plans that had been set against him, as they all depended on his being unable to control himself.

{ HP } --- { The fun side of magick } --- { HP }

During his vacations, Harry wanted to learn new spell lists but the camps' day & evening activities took away almost 75% of each day, so that limited his efforts to things that didn't ask for a lot of concentration. He looked through his trunk's study to find stuff he could read and practice as he walked or swam, or was just sitting during a toilet break away from the groups.

He settled on two short lists of easy dweomers that could actually help in his every day life on top of being fun to use. First was the 'Prosaics; Tricks of the Trade' that had a lot of the classic and cliché effects that people associate with fair grounds magicians and cartoon villains. It went from the very useful 'detections' to the just amusing glowing eyes and artificial smells to scare away people. The list was mostly to help kids practice the beginner's techniques and skills, with a handful of practicality so they could help around the house or shop as well. The second list was 'Prosaics; Circus Act' which had a lot of instant body boosters, spectacular acrobatics, and a few spells to help appease animals to work with them. The good sides of this list was that the spells would help Harry with his generalized health and sports activities while also giving him a better aptitude with the living animals inside his trunk, that he kept for food and zoo-therapy as suggested by his parents.

The fact that the little tricks of both lists could be combined with 'Prosaics; Warrior Law' to give him an edge during a fight, even with a mage or priest, was something that he thought about later on, when he was nearing the end of summer. Realizing that his personal defensive capacity were pretty much shitty, the child resolved to work on this during the coming year. He wouldn't make much of a Anti-Champion of Death if he didn't get serious about being lethal in combat. Reading theology treatises wouldn't help when the other guy had a gun or a Wand of Bolts.

Fourth school year; 1989-90

(Harry Potter - theme)

1989-90  
Surrey county  
The British Isles & Realms

Whelp, there was no two ways about it; the bobbies were all a-twitter with worries and bile as the much reputed (and dreaded) "Pedo Eunuchefier of Surrey" had not claimed a single kill or maiming over the entire summer. The Ministry of the Interior was frothing at the mouth at the thought the killer could have moved out of town or gone silent after his inner impulse had been satiated because that meant the entire investigation was going to get scuppered. Scotland Yard were hard-pressed to justify their undercover agents' expenses for the period since they caught nobody, and didn't even have a probable suspect in sight. The local bobbies were split between anger at being undone by a criminal, and yet happy to see a dozen pervs taken off their streets.

None of that brouhaha mattered to nine year old Harry Potter as he walked into Van Uttebatten academy for the fourth year in a row. The teachers were still competent and nice like the last two years, and the services were still offered every day of the year, so he lucked out and he knew it.

The classes for the year had been slightly adjusted from last, but only to update the textbooks to more modern versions since the old ones were rather dated, especially those on world history and the recent technologies. Due to the Internet becoming publicly accessible without fuss, television was no longer the benchmark for learning and fresh news bulletins. The BBC report at 6:00pm on the telly was a nice thing to accompany dinner, but being able to visit other channels from diverse parts of the country, or even the world, without special and costly subscriptions was a good addition to his daily routine for staying informed.

That was also the one true change for everybody in the campus; the addition of mandatory typing, computer usage and Internet search classes. Each week, the students were given a short lecture on the machines themselves, then had the second period to search for a series of predetermined subjects. Once they had found the few websites on those subjects, they had a sheet with form-questions to answer to prove they had really researched the problem tasked. Harry quite accidentally excelled at the skills required because it worked a lot like the enchanted typewriter and self-indexing books his mother had left in her trunk.

Maybe wizards were modern after all, and it was the muggles who were copying them?

Who knew the multiverse could be so weird, anyways?

{ HP } --- { Divine Quest; first } --- { HP }

Harry Potter hadn't wanted to become a murder at nine years old, except that he did pledge his heart, magic, mind and soul to the Cult of Hades, the church of Death. Somewhere, somehow, he should have guessed that it wouldn't just be his own enemies that he would kill, and it wouldn't be clean-cut cases of obvious guilt versus transparent innocence all around. Warfare was crass business; nobody came out of its bloody trenches civilized or clean, all the history books and anecdotal reports from old soldiers said it clearly. So did the few segments of battlefield medicine Harry had read while learning his apothecary spells.

Still, he really should have thought about it more.

But the choices were made, and his God demanded results on the task set. If Harry wanted to prove that he was more than just an accidental novice without potential, he had to gird his loins and get his hands to it. He would never get promoted to acolyte or full priesthood if he balked every time a little death-dealing was in the works.

Thankfully, the actual acts themselves were not some great titanesque conflagration like the epics in the Fantasy novels he read as entertainment. His God wanted the woman dead, but the how was entirely up to Harry's own devices, as long as she passed before the first of November, at noon sharp. The child had not been told why that date and time, and it didn't matter anyways.

Death was never late nor early, never rushed nor slovenly, but always at the appointed Time.

Such was the creed of the Faith. So would it be for this woman.

Harry didn't know her crimes or sins, nor did he know if she was innocent or noble hearted.

She was scheduled to die. End of story.

Therefore, on the evening of Tuesday, October 31st, the All Hallow's Eve of the Pagans and Wiccan, the Samhain of druids and witches, Harry Potter committed his first cold blooded kill.

He walked up to the house of the young mother of three infant children dressed in a banal Halloween costume that represented the classic Death; the grand black robes with a fake plastic scythe and a cheap black-colored tin lantern with a battery-powered light inside. The Tenebrous Pioneer who tended his greenhouse and food animals almost ululated himself into a tizzy at the sight of his summoner dressed, essentially, in drag. From his deathly perspective, at least. Now that Harry spoke Thanatos fluently, he got the cultural references easily, and got the joke as well. It really was funny, too, if you could see the context for what it was.

Standing on the front porch of the completely unknown woman, Harry accepted the candy with a gentle smile, and gave the woman a blessing in soft-spoken Welsh that left her stunned for a minute before she closed the door. As Harry walked away and activated the house-elf scripts of invisibility and un-presence sewn into his cheap cotton robes, the 'Childish; Trickeries' spell he had used on the woman took hold. His Welsh verse had been a camouflage for casting 'Poisoned Dart' at the woman's exposed throat, but softly pushed, without causing any injury, just delivering the vegetal toxin atop the skin. The perfectly mundane plant venom would react with her skin to become a rash, her airways would swell shut, then she would enter neural shock to finally die, in 23 seconds flat.

Harry had not even reached the end of the street when he FELT the woman's soul leave her body, and thus learned the lesson his deity wanted to teach him. For the truly faithful of Hades, there was no such thing as a wasted or useless death, and ALL mortal or Celestial souls were judged equitably in the End of Things.

Later that night, Harry celebrated his Halloween commemoration for those beings he had effigies of in his shrine. Hades rewarded him by sending the Shade of Dryskholl for an hour. The child and elf were incredibly happy to commune so, especially when Harry received confirmation that house-elves did in fact have a soul and got judged by Hades as fairly as others. The elfling had received a reward such has he truly deserved; he had been tasked to serve the ancestors of House Potter in their own places of Felicity until such Time as Harry himself would arrive for his own afterlife. And so, Dryskholl finally received in Death what menials and criminals had denied him during his ailing life, a good family that cared for him.

From that moment onward, Harry doubted less and less the motives of his chosen deity, and felt far less moral qualms about escorting souls unto the Path of Beyond.

"Requiesce in Pacem, Esspiritu Sancti. Id Mote Est." Harry whispered as he left.

Summer vacations 1990

(Harry Potter - theme)

1990  
Surrey county  
The British Isles & Realms

On the summer of his tenth birthday, Harry Potter was greatly amused by the foolishness of the adults around him. The squibs that watched over Privet Drive were still as useless and clueless about his lifestyle and conditions as ever, and never bothered to come ring the Dursley's doorbell to ask. The child was well aware of this because he had periodically returned to his ex-residence to place discrete elf scripts that anchored detection and divination wards over the household. Since he had several divinations texts in his possession, little Harry had begun to practice scrying and remote sensings two years back, as an added layer of security. He wasn't even truly surprised that Dumbledore and the Ministry never came calling at the house to insure he was still present.

In accordance to his mother's notes on magical society, having that much power that produces that much instantaneous effect on reality played havoc with people's sense of urgency and basal morality. A great many wizards and priests had the mindset that if Magyck flowed from your wand to empower the dweomer you cast, then you had every right to cast the spell, and all laws or justice be damned. After all, the Wizarding Ministry's motto was "Magic is Might" and they never bothered to hide it, regardless of how fascist it was. The White Council wasn't any better, what with their Wardens going around murdering people without any formal trial or even just a publicly logged Act of Accusation the population could be aware of.

No, one of the great problems of the magical societies seemed to be that all the governments, churches and guilds were all geared towards shutting down public debates, quelling any intellectual gatherings, and above all censuring or banning multiple segments of lore, know-how, technique, science, occultism, arcana and esoterism in favor of having the dumbest, most limitedly educated population that could possibly still make enough tradable goods to be taxed. That was the inescapable conclusion that any geopolitical and historical analysis came up with. The so-called 'White' and 'Light' and 'Pure Goodness' groups were all a sham front that hid the common agenda of all rich elites, magical or muggle alike; stay on top, no matter who it hurts or destroys. This conclusion gave Harry the impetus to read again through the books on insurgency, anarchy, political resistance and 'Sovereign Citizenship' that Dryskholl had gotten him. While the child's gut feeling was that some positions expressed were cooky or flat-out delirious, some of the underlying concepts weren't that crazy either. He may not want to have a civil war or crash a country, but Dumbledore was both head of Wizarding Britain and the magical UN at the same time, so it wasn't like he had a choice, not if he wanted his freedom.

Suffice it to say that Harry was both amused at the easy con he was pulling upon hundreds of wand-waving fools, and yet he was also truly disdainful of their collective incompetence. If they could lose trace of a child despite all their sensors and soldiers, what did it say about their self-styled elites? That it was the supposed "The Boy Who Lived" and killer of the greatest dark lord of Britannia, Europa and Slavia in several centuries, who had vanished into the Ether without leaving traces or anybody caring to look; what did that say about this Welsh Wiccan society?

His mother's commentary on the endemic lack of logic and forethought was apparently quite on-point. If the individuals already thought in a certain way, they would have been far less capable of the structured thought and rationality necessary to detect invasion of their Inner-World by curses and potions, and so would not have whelmed defenses in time. Plus, they were culturally indoctrinated to believe that the most powerful spell-caster had inherent rights and 'authority' over other magicals simply because he had a bigger core or stronger spells. It was almost like dogs sniffing each other's ass to smell who had the strongest odor to determine the leader of the pack. Her evaluation about Dumbledore's potions and curses passing so easily through people's minds because they were already predisposed to believe anything about Britain's greatest magick wielder were now making a whole lot of sense in the boy's eyes.

In any case, Harry read the magical papers with a nasty, superior smirk as he saw the fake images of their supposed "Boy Savior" representing a bespectacled, small, stunted and underfed pauper dressed in worn rags that was pretty much how he had looked at age 6. Somehow, the reporters or editors got their hands on an old still photo of him and did some sort of extrapolation to age him by four years to match the date. The 'simulacrum' looked close enough that if he still dressed like that, with a mess of short spiky hair that exposed his forehead scar and the ugly round glasses, then yes, anybody in Diagon Alley would recognize him without effort.

It was too bad for Dumbledore that he had in fact changed his body and his aesthetics long ago, when the Awakening Rite had blasted through a great many things. Then, helped by Dryskholl, he had fixed or changed his out-worn clothing, fixed his hair so it was longer but much more manageable, and taken nutrient potions to correct the previous five years of starvation. Getting his wizarding vaccines and food supplements diluted in each plate he ate also helped, something that he had kept up to this date, thus explaining why he now stood amongst the tallest of his year group and sported a good, lean, athletic muscle mass compared to the other kids. Bookworm he may be, and proud of it, but he wasn't a slouch or lazy bum either. He liked sports and camping with a tent and wood fire in the out-country, something he had taken to doing at least once a month throughout the year, regardless of the weather.

{ HP } --- { Camping fun } --- { HP }

Being able to ask the Tenebrous Pioneer to cast a Hadean Gate to reach his favorite spot inside of mere seconds was a great incitement to get up and move. Being able to just drop himself in a forest and run, jump, climb or swim without reproach or stupid limits from stodgy adults certainly helped to keep him fit and spry. It also allowed him to practice the limited fishing, trapping and hunting skills the Scout camps from last vacations had taught the kids. This year he would be with a more advanced group as they started splitting the students by capacities and merit badges earned.

Again, Harry split his time half & half between the Scouts and crafting groups. He liked the outdoors and team sports of the Scouts, but needed to learn the manual trades and crafting skills to insure his long term survival if he ever got separated from civilization or lost his magic. Also, the dimensional trunk he hid at his neck could in fact be found and stolen, it just took specialty spells that the master aurors and Unspeakables all had as part of their jobs, like their uniform and badges. Harry could not EVER take for granted that the trunk would always stay with him, or never get broken into, especially if Dumbledore detected its existence.

This year, Harry's Scout group was introduced to the wonderful device called a crossbow. A very old and simple idea that had been discovered by humans some 7,000 years back in China, the wood and rope contraption made hunting and defending MUCH easier. Especially when the eager young female coach showed them the other variant, the stone-bow, made with a small thread basket attached to the bow string to hold stones, pellets or other small projectiles instead of being limited to the classic arrows. It had less range, true, but the same punching power within the distance that it did cover. Plus, it was able to kill a small animal without damaging the pelts or tradable organs, thus preserving the best monetary value of each catch.

Nobody was surprised that Harry and several others chose to use their time in the crafting group to carve, sculpt, polish and test their own stone-bows. It was both a practical test of what they had learned, and in some cases the only protection they would have back home when they returned to Surrey. Harry was particularly proud that his bow tested as the strongest hitter and the longest reach. He had also talked with the hunting coach and the crafters until he had managed to make a string-basket with enough diameter so that he could still use regular arrows to benefit from the maximum range the bow could shoot accurately, at almost 500 feet far. The testing of the weapon allowed Harry to center the new wooden sights he added, a small wood cylinder at the back and a round crosshairs made of wood and thin thread at the front. He got four different merit badges for his product at the camp's Leaving Feast.

Harry kept up his yearly tradition of drinking two sets of potions to increase or bolster his mind, just as his mother had planned. Unlike most members of the Welsh Wiccan sect, Lily had known the value of speaking 'creature' languages, especially for those with scholarly dispositions. If a poor human wanted to increase his magic and fortunes, learning the traditions and methods of neighboring species and sects was the easiest, most direct route. Therefore, she had managed to acquire the pensieved memories of several young students from Hogwarts and other, smaller schools not belonging to the Welsh Wiccan, to compile two useful draughts. This year, Harry would be learning Dethek, the tongue of the Dwarven populations, and Peeptalk, the animal speech common to all birds and were-avians. Once he was done, he could appreciate the Dwarves' affinity and aptitude with minerals and forging as their language had hundreds of terms or phrases dedicated to the metallurgic arts. Likewise, Peeptalk was odd at first, but in the end just as easy to process and use as Parseltongue, which he practiced regularly.

{ HP } --- { The Ophidiomancers of Hedgerow Terrace } --- { HP }

Speaking of which, Harry was now in a good enough place emotionally that he began to practice not only the language of Parsel, but also the magic aspects of this art. After doing some research on the ancient magick, he found what he needed on a not-so-recommended map of Magical Britannia normally restricted for aurors. It was an old thing from his grand-father Charlus' belongings that Lily had copied when she became aware of it; explaining why many of her components' sources or clients were indicated on the colored map.

Going in the late evening after the camp's curfew started, Harry used house-elf glamours and muggle make-up to change his appearance, with elf wards stitched into his clothing as well, then passed through the floo in the trunk to access the public arrival floo in Diagon Alley. He ventured down Knockturn Alley fearlessly with his weapons openly displayed just like the locals, all the way to the end of the district filled with sicklies, whores and criminals. There he reached the much disparaged Hedgerow Terrace, a neighborhood filled with squibs, weak semi-spell-users, and poor disowned wizards who couldn't find jobs anymore despite being magically capable because their old families had black-listed them in the Ministry. This area was the place for people looking into original Celtic, Welsh or even Viking practices & traditions. Almost everybody here was Of The Darkes, and carried out The Old Ways in their daily lives, something Dumbledore and the Ministry he commanded decried in the Daily Prophet often. But, for Harry and hundreds of others, it was Heaven on Earth as all the best gardens and greenhouses, farms and ranches, and many food producers or apothecaries were located in this vast pastoral enclave.

And it was VAST; you just had to love space expansion enchantments and religious Fidelius wards that hid an entire faubourg the size of Little Whining right next to Diagon District and Knockturn District without being perceivable from there. At almost two miles long by a mile wide, the Hedgerow Terrace was literally the lung and liver of magical London, no matter what the fools in the Ministry or Hogwarts said in a vain effort to protect their ill-gotten powers.

The Terrace was a nice clean design, inspired by druidic and elvish glens of old, that was several oval plateaus that became smaller as they sunk in the middle, thus creating both lateral and vertical space to let in the sunlight and fresh air. There were four levels then the bottom floor, plus a wide ring of flat greenery around the dug-out zone. The large plantations, farms and ranches of livestock were all on the surface, in the perimeter's green fields. Each property had plots of land that varied from 500 x 500 feet going up to 2,000 x 2,000 feet, all bordered by a double row of trees with bushes in between and a small ditch of running water that created the homestead threshold to anchor the wards. The small streams flowed under permanent one-arch bridges made of field stones to link together into a larger district ward that added a second bubble of protection to repel diseases, vermin and detections from the overall zone.

At the very outer perimeter of the green fields was a single long coursive boulevard that had narrow townhouses of three and four floors, old-style Victorian lodging houses and low-end boutiques stacked high with tenements atop them, on both sides of the thoroughfare. This long curving merchant road served as the geographic border for Hedgerow Terrace, and made a living wall to protect the green space from being encroached or damaged by the rest of London or Wizarding Britannia. The poorer and less magically able citizens lived in the renting rooms or cheap tenements while the shop owners and few professionals had the townhouses or the odd ramshackle homes. It was a teeming mass of sentients of dozens of species that easily equaled all of Diagon and Knockturn together.

On each level of the Terrace Proper, the public street was located on the very lip of each step, with low-gradient earthworks & field stone ramps spaced out regularly to allow passage of mule carts between all elevations without problems. In the center of the bottom floor was an antique druid cromlech that stood two levels high topped by dozens of bronze braziers, creating a sacred space for communal prayers and special rituals. The Season Market was there, in the deepest middle of things, functioning all year long with only the thematic decorations being changed to match the religious events on the Wheel of days or the Natural cycle.

Amusingly from Harry's view of things, there were houses built as two-level dwellings dug-out of the stone & soil inside the risers of the plateaus, while their roofs served as the gardens for the house above. The overall look was like the mythical Shire of Tolkien, where the Hobbits lived. Neighbors were set apart by hedges of boxwood, cedar, or other types of trees that grew tall and firm, up to the level of the plateau above. To maximize illumination, nobody in the Terrace put trees or walls in front of their plot of land, only on the left & right sides up to the public street, with occasionally a thin, short fence made of wood or animal bones to keep the traffic off their land. Most of the Nature cultists and high quality artisans of the Hedgerow Terrace lived in the sunken zone as the homes were all designed with the same floor-plan that included a showroom, workshop and warehouse on the ground and spacious living quarters for eight people the elevated floor. Another thing unique to the Terrace homes was that all of them used their garden plot to grow herbs or spices, recreational weeds and several highly magical potions components.

Harry marched vigorously towards the sunken zone, smiling under his make-up as he took in the amazing sights of such openly living and working magicks, all being done regardless of the diktats of gormless bureaucratic drones who actually feared the magic in their own core so much that they tried to erase the Powers of others by paperwork. Humming a slow funeral dirge under his breath, the young Hadean cultist followed the narrow avenue down to the very bottom of the Terrace to reach the small kiosks that composed the permanent Market. His Goblin account manager had told him that the best option for him would be here; the sect of the British Ophidiomancers. They could possibly help him unlock his full Affinity and find a magical serpent with which to Bond, thus allowing him to practice Parselmagic and Ophidiomancy at higher caliber than the basic cantrips he had been limited to without a live snake.

It took very little effort to find the kiosk as it was made of wood carved in the shapes of hundreds of different snakes. As he approached, Harry saw that upon each serpent was engraved Parselscript that described the snake, ecology, abilities and usages in magic. The kiosk itself was a veritable encyclopedia of snake lore, as well as a true crafting masterpiece, despite that it was too gauzy and tent-like for Harry's tastes. Once inside, he was quickly attended by a member of the guild by dint of asking the woman a question in Parseltongue. She shunted her neophyte client to an acolyte while she answered the 'specialist' for his delicate needs. After about two hours and several scans, Harry had obtained an alchemic elixir to finish breaking the illegal binds on his Affinity, and he had been sold a copy of the ritual to summon a serpent familiar. The happy child paid and returned to the summer camp via one-time portkey that dropped him in the small copse of trees he had marked with a homing dweomer just for that use.

Harry drunk the elixir at the end of the camping week, when he was supposedly sleeping at home before going out for another week of camp on the following Monday morning. The potion worked as declared, eroding and dismantling the bindings until his Ophidiomancy Affinity was completely unlocked, just atrophied from not being used for so long. Harry spent three full weeks to slowly learn and practice a few more spells relating to snakes and reptiles before he used the few days between the end of camp season and the return to school to enact the Familiar Ritual for a magical serpent.

And here little Harry made an innocent beginner's mistake.

If he had done the ritual in the open public park or in a rural area like the camp grounds after they closed to the public for their maintenance cycle, he would have gotten a simple yet friendly snake native to Britain's magical ecology. Instead, he used the ritual chamber inside the trunk, never fully realizing the boosting effects that it would give to his spell's effects, nor the reach it would have across the dimensional veils.

He got an answer from something truly marvelous.

Faye-Drakhol akr-Seelie, Stygian Faerie Drake, from the Styx River connective demi-plane.

Barely 24 inches from snout to tail tip, with 36 inch wingspan, the small dragon-kind was a sub-race of the Faerie Drake species, amongst the Nexfae races. The creature resembled a miniature european dragon in body type and head shape, but had wings like a butterfly rather than a bat, and was colored a deep charcoal black with purple eyes, tongue, horns, fangs and claws. It also had several dark sapphire-blue highlights in the wings and horns that shone occasionally.

The small being was actually as intelligent as any human could become, but had never been formally educated and was barely two centuries old, making it an infant for its sub-race. It was a pretty well known fact that Faerie Drake could live around three millenia if they weren't attacked or sickened in a way that sapped their magick or damaged their brain stem passed their capacity to use their innate healing abilities. The baby dragon was already named by its parents and Harry only had to understand its language to translate it to human speech, English in this case.

His new familiar was called "Rehz Ib Fettach" which had no real meaning in English until Harry could really comprehend the specific Draconic Dialect as well as the Reptilian Common, and then he had to learn the provincial style that Rehz was raised with.

The Stygian Faerie Drake had many natural capacities, including the ability to become invisible, dampen his heat signature, stop his smell, move without leaving traces, 'Blink' in Material Space up to 1,000 feet, 'Dimension Shift' into the Styx or the Border Ethereal several times per day, and he had permanent 'Shen Power Sight' as all Faerie Drakes did. Personally, he could breathe a small cone, 10' long x 3' wide, of concentrated mist that would stun, disorient and drug his victims with a powerful psychedelic toxin produced by glands in his throat. Or he could spit a wad of digestive acid, if he needed to reduce something for consumption. And yes, he could do it in a fight as it was an inborn defensive reflex that he had trained. His main weapon was no doubt his Horns, as he could charge them with magic until they emitted an aura of pure negative energy that would bypass most known defenses to attack the mind, magick and soul of living entities in the 25 feet radial area covered by the pulse.

Above all else, Rehz Ib Fettach was intelligent, with free will and the capacity to learn, to educate himself and eventually be a well civilized entity that matched his human companion.

When the goblin manager saw the Faerie Drake, he almost laughed himself into a heart attack, ah he had just made a good amount of silver on a bet with several colleagues about how exotic a familiar his client would Bond. It truly was a good day to collect debts.

{ HP } --- { Bobbing bobbies a-bob } --- { HP }

Back in Surrey county's muggle side of things, the police and civilian authorities were starting to calm down. It had been two years since their "Pedo Eunuchefier of Surrey" had struck, and nowhere in the UK or Commonwealth had anybody died of similar causes and methods. The blokes at the Ministry of the Interior in London were gnashing their teeth at the thought the bastard had evaded capture in such fashion that even The Yard and Interpol had no clue about any possible suspects. While it was true that the lack of dead bodies was the appropriate order of things in the Realm, the fact it came from the killer's decision rather than his imprisonment bode ill for the future. The investigation went on, but now at a reduced pace until more cadavers were uncovered, or an order from 10 Downing Street put them back on war footing.

Fifth school year; 1990-91

(Harry Potter - theme)

1990-91  
Surrey county  
The British Isles & Realms

Young Harry Potter couldn't be called little anymore, as he had grown like a weed as of late, thus passing the four foot height mark sometime during the summer. In the year-long health classes mandatory for 10 year old's, the teacher warned all the children about possible growth spurts, pains in the joints or nerves as their bodies worked overtime to prepare them for puberty, and adolescence after that. The descriptions of anatomic details, hairs, odors and other unmentionable stuff had turned all the poor kids fluorescent pink in the face as they wanted to hide under their desks. Or at least, Harry had, much to his further discomfort.

Thank Hades and Gaia that it wasn't Vernon or Petunia who told him these things!

Thoroughly embarrassed by that discussion, the boy made sure to read through his mother's notes about it all, just to insure he didn't skip on a ritual or potion that needed to be in his system for the phases of his growth to proceed correctly. This brought him to realize that he would soon arrive at the moment when the Potter 'Blood Compact' would download the Family's Charter into his mind for him to -accept- the ancient Blood-Law and become a fully functional, deciding member of the clanic group. This was the vital step to insuring his autonomy inside the magical communities, and the sine qua non caveat to any further inheritances from any magical Houses, Guilds, Churches or private contracts still in abeyance. If he refused the Charter of his birthright, then no Blood-Law or other Magical Concord would ever accept him until he was over the age of 21 and did the ritual to found his own lineage, independently from any other in existence.

Since Harry was initiated by the Cult of Hades in full novitiate, he knew far better than to think being the only living Potter meant he was alone in the family, or that his decisions affected only his small, limited person. The ancestors, heirlooms and portraits of all his Houses watched over him, even those he didn't physically own yet. Plus, he was never more than a spell or prayer away from contact with his kin, even if they resided in Hadenshire. Only those that had already passed into The Beyond were out of reach from all entities, including the Divines. So Harry understood that when his mind was mature enough, just a bit before age 11, the Potter Blood-Law would integrate to his memories, mind, magicks and soul, and he welcomed the holy event as it would seal his positions for ever. It would also free him magically from several more of Dumbledore's curses and potions, while also legally opening more rights in higher society.

The rights he would obtain through Gringotts' banking contracts with House Potter and House Black were among the first things he would set in motion to blockade the whiskered bastard's choke-hold on his life. Then he would reactivate House Peverell unto the wizarding world, and see how people reacted to that piece of news. After that, he would silently use his mother's many aliases to run business ventures and muggle-world investments under the wands of everybody, while also paying out bribes, gifts and contracts for criminal deeds to further loosen Dumbledore's hold, or just distract his minions away from him. When he came out as a practitioner of The Old Ways of Magyck, the geriatric wanker's beard would light on fire and burn off his nose! And the rest of his sect of faithless betrayers would follow after him, the very second they heard their precious little messiah had oathed himself to Hades, Arbiter of Passage.

Oh yes, the Light of Wizarding Britain's phallocentric, sorcerous cabal would wilt and wane, and blink out in a puff of inglorious shame and humiliation, when the public learned of how dark gray their wunderkind had turned out. And blessed by the darkest of all the gods, too!

However, there was still this bloody last year of primary school to live through. The curriculum demanded not just mandatory basic human health & biology classes, but also home maintenance & cooking, basic personal economics, and an innovation being spread throughout the kingdom called 'British laws & civility'. To accommodate the increased number of classes without shorting the existent courses in the schedule, the 5th years had days that started at 9:00am and finished at 5:00pm all week long. They also had teachers that asked for term papers in theoretical subjects while the manual skills classes had one or two projects to complete each month. All told, Harry enjoyed the fresh classes and faster paced tuition. Also, this year was also ended by standardized government tests, so he could lay low then end his entire primary schooling with a good showing, as long as he didn't go above straight A's. Getting a slew of A+ or extra credits would certainly have someone panic, if not Dumbledore then some cretin inside the Ministry of Magic who couldn't tolerate that the boy who killed the Dark Lord be that intelligent.

{ HP } --- { A manual git, this boy } --- { HP }

Harry decided that he had learned enough from sufficient sources to try his hand at creating a few items of hedge-craft besides just candles, incense, oils and some glyphs on his clothing to walk around undetected. The few wooden whittles he'd made were cute, but in a very folk-art way, which he liked and thought enough to do the job he asked of them. Now that he had Rehz helping him with counsels and fetching items during the process, it was far less lonely and he experienced less accidents.

His first creation was the classic 'wooden spoon' of the homestead's leader. Basically a two foot long piece of birch whittled clean with the last four inches shaped into a relatively flat oval spoon. The thing was engraved with scriptworkes and elf wards, then given a Blood Tithe directly from Harry's hands. The item was then let to steep in a shallow pottery pan filled with enchanting oil to seal in the runes and protect them from wear & tear for a few years of use. This was a good, generic focus for beginners to have in hand, especially for all household charms, herbology, potions and alchemy. For the rest, it was tolerable but gave no advantages.

The second item Harry created was a necrotic construct. Yes, he had begun to study the lesser necromancies as part of his training into the novitiate of Hades, and thought it was now time for him to work with bones and parts of animals, not just plants anymore. Harry was already used to slaughtering his own chickens and turkeys, or helping the Tenebrous Pioneer with the bigger livestock, so it wasn't such a drastic step for him to take. Plus, he had already killed in combat and murder so, again, not such a big difference. Besides, he wasn't animating anything or going into the Anathema of Magyck, just cobbling bones and stuff together. His goal was to create his own personalized Holy Sigil of Hades so he could begin to learn and cast prayers above the novice grade. It was in fact a milestone of apprenticeship that the postulant make his own Sigil before he was granted promotion, and Harry felt it was time to move onwards. Since the device was a simple flat pendant scrimshawed out of bones then set into a silver frame to dangle from a chain made of both bone and silver links, the artistic and mechanical complexity weren't all that great, but it was the thought that counted. Harry dyed the bones lavender-purple, keeping the silver its natural dull grey. He used the workshop's magnification table to engrave scriptworkes and elf wards into the pendant and chain, then gave his Blood Tithe and a good steep in holy oil the recipe for which had appeared to him in a dream the night before.

The pendant functioned well, and Harry could feel his Faith and Sorcery respond well to the addition into his aura. Bolstered by the event, Harry offered to make a similar pendant, but sized and fitted to Rehz so as to give them a link and the capacity for Harry to protect him remotely. The little Faerie Drake accepted gratefully, slowly realizing just how kind and caring his human was, compared all the others he'd seen in his 200 years of life. He also realized just how lonely and isolated Harry was. Despite making friends in the school, he could never ask them home as they could never know of the trunk or magic in general.

The third object Harry wanted was much more complex, and something he had been thinking about as he read some of the lore associated with the White Council of Edinburgh. He decided to make himself a Shillelagh, or druid's staff. The boy scoured several rural areas that the Tenebrous Pioneer could open gates to until he found the appropriate tree. It was an old English Oak that had been felled by lightning, a few weeks back. It was partially blackened and still had bits of cremated mistletoe fused to sections of the branches. Impressed by the size, strength and magic inherent to the mighty vegetal, Harry decided to render the tree's entire mass down to separate parts, except for the trunk that stayed in two long half-logs just as they had been sliced by the lightning strike. The Pioneer helped with cutting and transporting the bounty back to the trunk's warehouse since landscaping was its basic job description. Harry spent many days with Rehz drowning in old Welsh and Celtic texts about the druids, witches and animists of the epoch, until he decided what kind of staff he needed to craft. He wanted an item that would serve him during both his priesthood of Hades and Gaia, not be a specialized thing just for killing or molding Nature to human whims.

The finished product was an eight foot length of gnarly, burned bark and cremated mistletoe and mushrooms, the bark being dark emerald-green while the inclusions and incinerated additions were dark amethyst-purple. The top of the staff was actually shaped as a torch sconce, the limb being split into twelve slats to shape a bowl that held 'Spirit Flames' that Harry had been able to invoke for the first time of his life. The sconce bowl was reinforced with inch-thick triangular flanges of silver to give it the ability to strike like a mace. The foot of the staff ended in a boar-spear shaped head with a cross-bar for the same reason, also reinforced along the edges and fuller with silver to have a sharp edge. While silver was a bad choice for striking and slashing weapons because it was too soft and deformed easily under impact or torsion, his patron God Hades had revealed to him the recipe for Hadean Silver, which was smelted by adding the freely Tithed blood, magic and soul of the crafter. This silver always had dark ocher veins running through it, and could tolerate wear or hardships like dweomercrafted steel. This made the finished weapon just as good as if it were forged metal instead of carved wood. As completing touches, Harry added the crests of Hades and Gaia just beneath the sconce bowl, but on opposite sides, to properly Bless the item on top of all the scriptworkes and elf wards he had placed. The last step was to steep the staff in a tub of oils that were mixed from diverse plant saps, animal bloods, Nightsoil from the livestock pen, and Blood Tithes from Harry and Rehz.

The magical aura of the activated staff was breathtaking, and calming at the same time. When he first took the weapon in hand, Harry was reminded of good Bishop Gloutnay and his decades of service to Mystra. And so, his first official gesture with the staff was to carry out a private mass in the trunk's ecumenical shrine in the names of Hades, Gaia and Mystra, to thank them all, and the spirit of the noble oak, for allowing him to confect such a magnificent item of Faith.

Harry felt that a few things were missing from his fighting kit, but also felt that he wasn't ready to design or craft them yet. As age, experience and Divine Wisdom flowed through him, he had begun to truly trust in those small instincts that came when he was pondering important parts of his life, so he accepted the hint and waited for the proper time. Death, after all, cannot be late or miss an appointment, no matter what happens around it.

{ HP } --- { And so we of Potter Blood are gathered } --- { HP }

It happened to Harry as these things tend to happen since the last few years have come to pass, after he had succeeded his Awakening Rite. It was Wednesday, October 31st of 1990, the All Hallow's Eve, the Samhain of his Faith and tenth such season since his birth. As was his custom, he had done his morning exercises and showered, then had a breakfast composed of eggs, crepes, toasted bread with field fruit jam, bacon rashers and baked beans with brown gravy. Everything had been hand-made by himself in the previous week then stored in the pantry for the day of prayers and remembrance. He now stood serenely in prayer before the small ecumenical shrine he had built and consecrated for commemorating his gods, ancestors and friends four years ago. It now had a framed picture of Rehz Ib Fettach and small preserved twigs from the birch and oak he had used to craft his first important Faith items. He gazed in satisfied peacefulness at the grey candles that he had crafted with his own hands, smelling the bee's wax and holy herbs of the incense as they burned, bringing his prayers and good wishes through the Ether to those that deserved them.

The Tenebrous Pioneer that Harry had rented to tend his greenhouse and livestock barn stood by his side, whispering lowly in Thanatos the prayers and supplications of the season. He wished farewell to the departing Autumn that had granted his House bountiful harvests, and welcomed the ponderously slow Winter that would rest the Laand so that it may awaken full of life when the Wheel of Days pivoted anew unto Spring.

Harry went to his classes as regular then disappeared back into the hidden basement room, from where he entered his trunk and had a normal dinner at 6:00pm. It was as he did his evening prayers in preparation for communing with his departed ancestors and friends that the first symptoms manifested. The Potter 'Blood Compact' was activating automatically to download something into his memories, magick and mind.

As the clock struck 8:00pm, the human child felt the Veil thinning around himself, the partition between realities becoming permeable just enough for direct conversation and perception, but not passing objects or beings across. Sitting on stone thrones before him were now situated all of the Potter, Black and Peverell forebears, as they attended witness to his accession to the first adult step of the clanhold's leadership. Tonight, the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Potter would have its Magical Heir instated, and his position in the Charter would be unassailable by any mortal or Celestial, not even The Manipulator or his potioned puppets.

Sitting on the greatest throne in the middle of all the three noble Houses was the darkest, most powerful of all the witnesses; the Divine Hades, Lord of Hallowed Nepenthe, Sovereign of Hadenshire, God of Death, Arbiter of Passage, Guide of Beyond, Guardian of the Grand Gate of Reality. He was dressed in an armor composed of black padded base layer, dull grey chain mail hauberk and deep lavender-purple full-plate armoring on top. His great helmet covered his head entirely, the face being a smooth oval plate of shining, reflective silver that mirrored only Truth and Reality back at whomever looked into it. Or at least, it was one of the god's avatars or lesser images, since Harry didn't think little old him deserved or warranted so much attention as to have the Tenebrous One attend this private ritual in person.

The Shades of the three dead Patriarchs of the noble Houses stood from their thrones and walked forward one pace, so they were just behind the throne of the Divine Hades, before James Potter spoke aloud, his voice carrying through phonically as much as mentally.

"I am James Charleson Black Potter, the late Lord Potter emeritus, Scion of Black, Scion of Peverell, sire of the Heir of the Name, House and Family magicks of Potter. I present onto my son by Blooded birth and lawful marriage, magical and spiritual Heir of our kin, the Charter and Blood-Law of House Potter."

Next to Harry appeared a ghostly facsimile of the real scroll which was safely stored deep in the foundations of Potter Manor, well out of reach of enemies, climate or Time. Harry took the time to unfurl and read through the detailed but simple texts, understanding that once he put his personal Sigil on it, he would be bound by Blood, Mind, Magick and Soul to the ancient Creed and morality of his Family. Yes, he would have the chance to make changes or updates, as each Lord did, but the process was both heavy and slow, and it implicated the assent of the ghostly ancestors and heirlooms, but it was still feasible.

After reading through the much beloved Charter of his ancestry, Harry prayed to Hades and Gaia for the Tithe to be given freely from his body and magicks, that he be bound to his Family in the one way that truly mattered amongst the magical communities and churches. He was now Harold Jamieson Evans Potter, Head of Family, Lord of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Potter, Earl of Claymoors of the Scottish Lowlands; Heir Ascendant of the Most Venerable and Greatly Spiritual House of Peverell, Heir Presumptive of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Black; Peer of the Britannic Realms by Edict of the Crown and Throne of England, anointed of Hades, his God and Patron amongst the eddies of Faith and mortality.

In confirmation of the rite's validity, the Scion, Heir and Lord rings appeared on his hands in appropriate succession, then merged together by House until only the highest crest for each stayed visible. An antiquated medallion made of ceramic strung from a chain of porcelain beads appeared at his neck, dropping to hang over his heart. A set of old, ornate bronze keys manifested in empty air near his chair and slowly floated to rest on his lap, filling him with a sense of home and peace as he had never felt, even from his Awakening.

A powerful voice reverberated through the air and the minds of all assembled, be they alive or dead or between the Veils. "I am Hades, God of Death, Judge of Passage, Arbiter of The Beyond, and Guardian of the Grand Gate of Reality. I am the patron you have chosen freely for this part of your journey through the mortal planes, and patron deity of the House of Peverell, of whom you have accepted Heirship. I welcome you into the Halls of your honored ancestors, and offer you the fealty of the Family and House. May your reign be long and prosperous."

Standing from his throne, the Living God gestured for the three Shades of the Patriarchs to sit back so he could assume control of the ritual period. "I have come today, via my avatar, to bear witness to your acceptance of the Potter Charter, and was satisfied. Now I offer you the same for the Peverell Charter, regardless of what the fool Dumbledore has wrought. Will you assume the position that is yours by birthright and magick, of your own free will?"

Harry was completely besides himself with emotions, as his deity once again showed that he cared enough to get involved, and had solutions that could right the wrongs he had suffered all his meager life. Nodding silently, the child bowed from the waist, not uttering a word for fear of losing control of his already strained self-restraint.

The God raised his left hand, the armored palm facing up so that a large scroll made of gaseous soul-stuff that shined electric blue appeared in his grasp. With nary a thought, the phantom scroll floated gently towards the child, to alight in his own waiting, trembling hands. As before, he took the time to admire the scroll then unfurl it to read everything, trusting that Time moved differently in the ritual period so he could do everything needed in a short interval. After learning the sacred texts of the oldest House to sit in the British Wizengamot, Harry prayed his Gods for the Tithe to be given freely, in honest and glad acceptance of the new charge of trust and Family.

He was now Harold Jamieson Evans Potter, Head of Family, Lord of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Potter, Earl of Claymoors of the Scottish Lowlands; Head of Family, Lord of the Most Venerable and Greatly Spiritual House of Peverell, Baron of All-Hallows and the Hoo Peninsula; Heir Ascendant of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, Magistrate of Zezetshire Cairnhills in the English Midlands; Peer of the Britannic Realms by Edict of the Crown and Throne of England; anointed ecclesiaste of Hades, his God and Patron amongst the eddies of Faith and mortality.

The child closed his eyes as his mind trod through the changes in titles, ranks and styles that getting the Peverell Charter signed had given him. He knew that the 'Blood Compact' of the Family would download into his memories, mind and magick over night as he slept, and then his occult affinities would change to incorporate the spiritual heritage of the almost obsolete House, before balancing everything inside of him into a functional whole. It would take a few days and nights of meditation and rest, but it would happen in due time.

So would it happen with the House of Black as well. The Charter had not appeared or been offered, probably because potions and curses still fettered some deep parts of his magick specifically against receiving anything from Sirius Black or his House. Even the Goblins had not been able to pass along parcels, mail or just verbal messages in the ten years since the man had been exiled. Dumbledore had well and truly muddied the legal and diplomatic waters, something which could be undone only if he died, if Harry left Britannic borders to go meet his godfather, or if the boy finally managed to pump enough magicks and willpower through his entire being to finish breaking the damned binds.

The voice of his God brought him out of introspection, as the deity declared with his cavernous voice that echoed through space, dimensions and Times "You have served me well, these passed four years. You have followed the terms of novitiate without pause or doubts that would have made myself or my higher council wonder of your devotion and dedication to our Faith, Creed and Cause. The Test of Murder was passed with simplicity and humanity, showing your soul and goals in life quite clearly. Cruelty and battle-rage will not be your Creed or method, not when a peaceful, dignified solution can be had. I applaud this, for death should not be something other than intensely private and solemn, though not lonely or desperate, not while I rule Nepenthe, in Hadenshire upon the Styx. After consulting with Jergal, Seneschal of Death, and the higher council of my church, I find reason to promote you to acolyte. You may now begin to read and learn the true holy texts of our Faith, not simply the common lores and laws available to all scholars and governments. I hope to receive your Faith and service for many long years yet, young one, for we have a long path to tread before I pass you unto Gaia's dominion."

Standing unsteadily from his chair, Harry bowed at the waist, honored beyond description that the Divine would send an avatar to assist his Oaths and grant him promotion when a simple mortal priest could have done the job easily. Without further adieu, the Fundamental God ceased to exist and so did his throne, as if they had never been present at all, in such a way that all the chairs of the honored ancestors were placed as if there had never been a higher ranking visitor in the middle of their phantom room. Again, the three Patriarchs stood, each in turn giving a blessing upon the child's life, health and magicks before the assembly dissipated into the Ether.

Harry cried honest, happy tears as the slight grey mists of Time and Reality receded from around him, releasing his person, familiar and shrine back into the Prime Material Plane. He would take a small late snack with a celebratory ounce of very fine Goblin wine and a long smoke of tobacco, hemp and calming herbs, before taking a long soothing shower and bed at midnight. He was exhausted physically, but mentally he felt as if he had lived and relived the same life five times in the same hour. Having no reserves left, the child permitted himself his small feast with Rehz Ib Fettach by his side, while the Tenebrous Pioneer went about his nightly duties in the greenhouse and livestock barn, now that his own prayers were done too.

Tomorrow would be soon enough to live well and happy with his elevation. Tonight, Harry Potter planned to lie as peaceful and tranquil as the honored dead, even if the bloody midget of the mists decided to till him into his mattress for fun. As long as he wasn't woken up, he'd handle it another day.

{ HP } --- { Albus Dumbledore's heart attack } --- { HP }

Despite being a sorcerer of great learning, erudition and occult abilities, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore was actually rather ordinary when it came to his Faith, Creed and morality, no matter what cold shite he tried to peddle to the credulous masses. He had nothing of an actual Warlock, let alone an Atlantean-tradition Warlock, except the title that signified he had acquired the right to sit in the Wizengamot chamber as a voting member. Likewise, his title in the ICW was simply a reflection of the fact the Confederation was mostly of male wizards who were all named symbolically 'Warlock' when they achieved a seat inside their home nation's Gamot. It wasn't a reflection of studies or training pattern, just an honorific title with little true worth, given just how several nations had hereditary seats, some were elected by popularity, and yet others were bartered and sold between holders or governments like pints of ale in a tavern.

No, Albus Dumbledore was not the brightest candle in the chandelier, and yet he always managed to somehow blind himself with his own luminous splendor, no matter how dark his glow actually was. In this case, the moron had the gumption, the sheer hubris, to think he could interfere with the Blood-Law and inheritance rules of the Most Venerable and Greatly Spiritual House of Peverell, Barony of All-Hallows and the Hoo Peninsula in Kent, on England's lower eastern coast, not far from London-on-Thames. The House who had always had Hades, God of Death, the Styx River demi-plane and the Underworlds, as its only patron in recorded history.

An act of wisdom, this was not.

And even less an act of self-preservation.

So it wouldn't surprise anybody affiliated with the cult of Hades or the Church of Death that the foolish old crone suffered an unpredicted, and unblockable, heart infarction exactly on midnight of the Halloween night, at the height of Samhain, when the Veil was thin and the Divine Powers could pass easily from one reality to another. Nobody would ever know what Albus Dumbledore saw that night as he lay in bed, nor if it was in the room, his mind or his dreams, but the house-elves who found him and brought him to the castle's hospital wing for emergency treatment had never seen such a face of horror and despair on a human before, in their centuries of service.

Madam Poppy Pomphrey, the school medi-witch, did what she could and then some more, pushed as she was by the loyalty compulsions and potions flooding her body for the last forty years. Alas, it was all for nothing; Albus Dumbledore was alive, but in a coma that initially looked as if it was just his body breathing on without any soul inside. Then, 13 days after the event, the man's vitals started to Beep the sensor spells, showing that he was emerging from coma into normal healing slumber managed by his innate magicks. Another 13 days later, towards the end of November, he opened one single eye and tried to speak but could not articulate his thoughts aloud. The heart infarction had crippled the right side of his body, from the small toe to the top of his head, making his mouth and vocal chords work asymmetrically or not at all, thus making him incapable of any speech, even incoherent words or vocalizations of pain or despair. For the first time in is entire life, Dumbledore was mute from a cause that wasn't a quickly resolved 'Mutare Vocis' during a duel or back-alley fight.

Given his resulting status, Pomphrey was finally able to free herself of his standing orders that absolutely all health issues of the staff, children or house-elves be resolved by his own hirelings inside the castle walls, or at least the grounds under the wards. This was something that even the potions of Severus Snape couldn't repair or attenuate, so the medi-witch could finally appeal to St-Mungo's Hospital for an emergency recovery team to transfer the geriatric dictator to the hands of somebody else. It only took minutes for the trauma team of healers to arrive by Floo, and only seconds more for the hospital's dispatcher to have spread the news to a dozen papers and gossips who would pay a goodly number of Galleons for the fresh news about Dumbledore.

Nobody could find a reason for sudden heart failure, and even less for the massive damage that had killed tissues, nerves and veins all around the cardiac complex. The only way the healers were able to give Albus a menial semblance of health and mobility was by putting a permanent 'Organ Bypass' enchantment anchored to runes tattooed on his wrinkled chest to reestablish sufficient blood flow. The only recourse for his mobility was to have a tailor craft clothing that had thin but heavily ensorcelled wooden rods everywhere throughout to give the vestments the ability to follow his willpower to move his body for him, in those areas that brain influx or blood no longer flowed correctly. Muggles would call this system a "medical exoskeleton" and hail the sheer modernity of its conception, if they were aware it existed.

The great and mighty Chief Warlock of England was reduced to being a puppet with broken limbs dancing on twisted strings, just as he had inflicted on thousands of beings for a century.

Who says Hades has no sense of fairness?

Who says that Death had no sense of humor or irony, albeit dark ones?

No matter what potions, alchemies or surgeries he would try, Albus Dumbledore would never recover any usage at all of his right side, and only be able to speak or move because he wore animated cloth golems enchanted to emulate his human abilities. If ever that layer of powered vestment was removed or dispelled, he would immediately be an immobile, silent cripple who couldn't defend himself with anything other than legilimancy, and only from the left eye which cut off two-thirds of his total mind-magick for the rest of his life.

The immediate consequence was that Dumbledore ran afoul of the health & sanity clauses of the charters of the school, the British Wizengamot, and the ICW. You had to be demonstrably healthy and sane in order to hold any post of public authority, especially as a judge or Lord.

When the Hogwarts Board of Governors looked into his file, they found out that he had quite liberally rewritten his original file by stating his birth date and age as being a full twenty five years younger than true. He hadn't passed his NEWT's in 1914 on the start of the muggle's Great War, not if you counted backwards from today. He had spent 50 years as headmaster, 30 years as transfiguration professor and alchemy tutor, and spent almost 10 years before that on the road to complete his masteries in arithmancy, transfiguration & transmutation, and alchemy. That was 90 years at least, and there were doubts as to whether he took only ten years for his higher diplomas as those dates didn't mesh with the official reports in the guilds or Ministry schooling records. Furthermore, the Hogwarts Book of Souls had no Albus Dumbledore listed before 1873 as potential student, and he was the only 'Albus' named for that decade, and none came for a good twelve years before that.

As if falsifying the dates in his school and employment files weren't enough, the second investigation caused by this discovery found something even more dark in progress. It averred that Albus Dumbledore had never been sworn-in as Headmaster of the school. He had signed in blood the contracts as staff and oaths as teacher for the first twenty-two years, then for some reason that wasn't written anywhere, the Headmaster of the day, Armando Dippet, had stopped forcing Dumbledore to sign in blood the contracts for his position, link to the castle wards and position of authority over the pupils. In essence, Dumbledore had been completely free to do as he pleased inside the grounds and edifices without any risks of being punished by Mother Magyck for his crimes or sins.

This made the bureaucrats panic and alert the aurors, but also the medias, and then St-Mungo's to check if the cause of the heart attack couldn't be some form of ward backlash or oath-breaking retribution. So, the entire investigation from the Board of Governors transferred over to the aurors, in the hands of Madam Amelia Bones, Regent of House Bones, head of the DMLE, the very worst event possible for Albus Dumbledore. She would NEVER stop digging into his dirty laundry and hidden crimes until she had enough to see him fed Squibbing Oil, then hanging him by the feet from the battlements of Azkaban Prison for a few days before letting the Dementors take his soul.

But no, things got worse from there anyways!

Because he had held a posting of public trust without being blood-oathed as stipulated by the school charter and British Law, then he was automatically dismissed from that post and forbidden from ever holding it anew in this life. This immediately freed the house-elves and portraits who wasted no time in demanding the attention of the aurors and Madam Bones to report the innumerable depravities they had witnessed Dumbledore commit inside Hogwarts, or plan in the castle and commit outside. This caused the immediate suspension of all school staff for an emergency medical evaluation and debriefing at St-Mungo's.

However, the loss in dishonorable circumstances of one oathed posting also meant that he was deemed as being an 'Oath-Breaker' just as if he had signed the pledge and broken the terms, thus incurring the wrath of Mystra. That meant an automatic dishonorable dismissal from the Wizengamot as both Chief Warlock and simple Warlock, no appeals or electoral recall process possible. It also opened all of his work files as Chief Warlock that he had sealed under the "Needs of national security" to become available for investigation by the aurors and Unspeakables separately. And that was when the authorities found that the lying bastard had not ever taken the Gamot blood-oath, not as proxy, not as seated Lord, not as Warlock and not as chief Warlock. Dumbledore had been sitting, presiding sessions or tribunals, and voting the Potter proxy for a decade, without ever having the legal or magical right to do so. Which triggered another investigation into his entire tenure in the Wizengamot chamber and offices, as well as his truly abusive wielding of the chief Warlock's capacity to seal files or make entire cases disappear into the tenebrous, bottomless mists of "National security" justifications without any checks or balance about it.

The British Department of Schooling, Department of Magical Law Enforcement and Wizengamot Services were all panicking about what had been uncovered while Dumbledore was in his first week of permanent infirmity, but it was only the beginning. The ICW began to receive reports from both its embassy in London and the British delegation in Basel, Switzerland, where the Great ICW Rotunda was located since founding. Because of the ICW charter and the Treaty that links it to member states, the very moment that Albus was dishonorably removed from his posting at Hogwarts, he was automatically put on probation at the ICW until a public trial under their venue and laws could be done. However, the moment it was discovered he was an 'Oath-Breaker' to the British Gamot, he was given an immediate dishonorable dismissal from the Chamber as both Supreme Mugwump and foreign representative for the Sovereign Magical Nation of England, Realms & colonies. This had the catastrophic consequence of removing the last diplomatic privileges he could use to hide from the aurors or Unspeakables, in England or abroad. Then the ICW Enforcers discovered that Albus never signed the blood-oaths for participation in the Assembly, nor those for holding an executive posting in the organization. He always used fake parchments covered in mundane texts and signed with a muggle fountain pen filled with house-elf blood to emulate the magicks of a Blood-Tithe to fool the auditors and diplomats each year, ever since he set foot in the ICW fifty years ago.

Now completely devoid of any public postings, governmental authorities or diplomatic privileges, without any nobility title or personal reputation, mister Albus Dumbledore, not noble and not rich, holder of no votes anywhere, with diplomas and guild memberships whose validity or legality were now being questioned, saw himself chucked into Ministry cells to await interrogation. He was cooling his heels in the drab grey, raw masonry room under the Gamot chamber's floor barely nine days after being transferred to St-Mungo's for treatment. He had received his golemized clothes only two days ago, and still wasn't used to moving in them, let alone relying on them for his autonomy or spell casting. Not that the last part would be a concern as the Elder Wand had disappeared from his hand as his dark, nightmarish visions of Death, an unending city of bones and great lines of tormented souls began, just before the heart attack struck. Neither house-elves, teachers or healers had found it since, and his original dragon heart-string wand had been seized upon arrest. They had wanted to put magic suppressors on him, but only the written report from the hospital stayed their merciless hands away from his person.

Then Albus heard what he had dreaded all the past decade, on the wizarding wireless that the auror sentry was listening to, since there was nothing to do in the small antechamber next to the locked cell. The news of his decheance and arrest was making the rounds of the entire planet, fast enough that Sirius Orion Black III, Head of Family, the Lord Black, was already beginning proceedings to have his entire case before the ICW used to push Britannia into granting him his day in front of the Wizengamot or Royal Throne at long last. The loss of control over both the Potter and Longbottom boys was now consumed in full, as was the loss of dominance over the broken lordship of Black.

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore had nothing left in life except regrets, memories of the broken plans he had fomented for The Greater Good, and his brother Aberforth's eternal contempt, which he was given freely forever.

{ HP } --- { The Goblin king's vengeance } --- { HP }

One could never say that Ragnok Backsnapper, head of clan Gutspiked, 471st king of the British Goblins, was a creature of benevolence and mercy. Not unless you had partaken of the Halfling Sherry a bit much for the entire week beforehand, and smoked some interesting recreational herbs too.

Yet, in this period of Yule 1990-91, he found himself smiling and humming an old religious Drow chant normally used in sacrifices of victims on the Altar of Lloth, their Spider Queen that dwelt in the Abyss. He sat happily by the side of the blazing hearth in his office, slowly honing and oiling a spiked scourge with many strands in prevision of applying it most generously unto the back of a hairy mongrel cur that had escaped Lady Justice for far too long. The monarch was almost finished with one instrument and gazing indolently upon the pile of others that needed some maintenance before being put to 'good' uses, when his secretary called him urgently.

"M'lord!" the breathless voice sounded through the crystal intercom on the desk, "The Gamot has just voted Dumbledore out of the assembly on proof of 'Statutory Oath-Breaking' via denying and falsifying of blood-oaths demanded by law and treaties." The poor secretary took an audible gulp of water before continuing "He has been remanded to the high security wing of Azkaban Prison pending a full trial, but the ICW have already deposited in full chamber their official request for extradition to Basel. Apparently, he pulled the same bullcock trickeries on them as he did here."

Smiling widely for the happy turn of events, he snapped a small spark of magic at the crystal to switch on his microphone to order "Get me the Potter account manager in this office the moment he's able to present himself with all his client's files on Potter and Peverell, plus the Black Heirship since it hasn't been rescinded and Sirius Orion Black has no children in sight. And have the floor's kitchen send up a banquet for a dozen people. I want all the assistants and the Black manager with his team too. We're going to war over this, and I'm not letting go till I get me some hairy wizard's noggin on a spike!"

"By your will, majesty!" the secretary replied, full of violence and bile for the bearded fool who had done so much damages to the reputation and relations of Gringotts with its human neighbors all over the planet. The young goblin would be sharpening his ax and arrowheads as he sent out the messages, hoping that his mighty and generous king would let him punish the human a small bit, between his own turns at the felon's oily, stinking hide. This really was shaping up to be an incredible Yule season, after all.

A few very joyful days later, the Goblins of Gringotts were given the rare pleasure of receiving, for the first time of his life, the young Harold Potter inside their hallowed halls under the city of London. Due to the cursed bindings on his magical core, Harry could not enter the bank or Goblin lands in person as long as Albus Dumbledore had any pretensions of being his legal & magical guardian. He had emitted a 'decree' in the Wizengamot chamber that he was not certain Lord Voldemort's magic hadn't damaged the boy's mind. In light of such doubts, the felon had ordered that any and all banking correspondence or decisions be given to him alone for disposal, unless the child initiated contact - from afar - or reached the age of 11. Since Dumbledore had also committed the legalistic tracasseries to bar anybody from accessing the Potter accounts and vaults unless they presented in person for an Identity or Inheritance Blood-Tithe Ritual, it was in essence a catch-22 permanent block on Harry ever gaining access to anything in this life.

Until he found a house-elf who ferried the necessary documents between Gringotts and Harry.

The Manipulator had blocked the Potter, Peverell and Black accounts but never knew anything about those that Lily Evans had under her many legal names and pseudonyms. This was the very first fatal mistake he had made concerning the woman, and it would be the last he ever did.

The Goblins were motivated to follow the very narrow letter of the illegal decrees just enough to avoid a genuine war, but still grant the child the basic services he should have at his age and capacity. The small diplomatic snit they had in public was just a bit of a warm-up in preparation for what came to fruition now. And it really was a menial little paperwork snit, as no honor duels had been declared and no pass of arms was fought in the field. That said snit netted the Goblin Nation further civil rights, commercial benefits, and more freedom of movement on the surface for their non-titled citizens was just that much more fun for everybody inside Gringotts.

Now, the bearded Manipulator was finally cast aside like a bad batch of mushroom lager that even the goblin-hounds didn't want to sniff, and for cause! That meant that just as with the Gamot and ICW, the good King Ragnok was now able to order audits and investigations into each and every act that Dumbledore had done inside his sovereign lands since the decrepit human was born. And boy did they find plenty of crapulence to expose in the public medias or courtrooms all across Britannia, Europa, Slavia and the Mediterranean shores!

Albus had been silently piling up a trove of stolen monies and artifacts by committing Line-Theft at least once a decade since he had passed his OWL's with somewhat ordinary results. The man would study all the muggle-borns in his vicinity then pick one who should be related to a Pureblood wizarding lineage through an affair or rape that had been hidden. Once he managed to steal a few drops of blood to power his genealogical divinations, he would decide if this was the target he wanted. When he had settled on a choice, he cornered the person and used a bevvy of compulsions and potions to make the helpless victim sign over all their worldly possessions in both magical and muggle societies with a falsified blood-bound contract. Then he compelled the person to go home, write a suicide letter and use a 'Dark Cutting Curse' to open their throat all the way to the spine. A few days after the death was discovered by the aurors, Albus sent his solicitors into Gringotts to deposit the contracts and begin the transfers into personal vaults under fake names.

Since the year 1889 when he sat his OWL's to this day, covering 101 years of felonies, Albus had managed to steal no less than fourteen family inheritances, and insured the End-of-Line of five families who could have survived, even if the manner it happened was crass. In any ways, the revelation of this was the door that slammed on the kneazle's tail, making everybody inside the jurisdiction of the ICW, and especially Britain, take to the streets in massive riots, from the lowest peasant or vagrant to the highest lords and diplomats, all chanting for Dumbledore to be given the worse sentence imaginable to wizard-kind.

Poisoning with Squibbing Oil followed by obliviating his decades of occult studies, surgically destroying his vocal chords and hand tendons, then finally abandoning him in a muggle asylum for the insane. He would always have a vague echo of his magicks and powers, but never truly remember them, only feel the soul-deep loss, which he could never explain to anyone.

Chances of such cruelty being done, however, were thin. The population might be screaming for his death, but it was not in any ways sure they would tolerate that it be done in this manner, mostly because it meant that somebody else could be sentenced to similar as well. With the way that corruption and unnaturality had stalked the halls of the Wizengamot for nearly a century, you would be hard-pressed to find a single citizen who would trust the tribunals or aurors with this kind of power over the life of anybody in the country, even against non-humans.

Such was the good news that young Harry Potter was explained by King Ragnok in person, as he showed the juvenile Lord the sights of Diagon Alley ablaze with torch-bearing rioters from the window of his office, high in the upper floors of Gringotts' façade. With the portly, and extremely afraid, Minister of Magic Cornelius Oswald Fudge standing on a hastily conjured platform, just before the white marble steps of the bank, to appease the crowds, the Goblin monarch was finally able to give the boy the audience and rituals he should have undergone since the deaths of his kindred. With the powerful confidentiality and security wards keeping the noises from the busy commercial street out of the room, the Potter, Peverell and Black account teams began the long and tedious job of getting their client up to speed on his estates, businesses and legal standing.

At the same time, one of the Goblin Nation's senior ambassadors walked out of the massive front doors to go deliver to Cornelius Fudge the Goblin Nation's ultimatum. Ragnok demanded that the Treaty dispositions be applied in full; because he had falsified contracts, inheritances and legacies through the bank, and that most of his crimes were against under-age persons to boot, Albus Dumbledore was to be handed over immediately for trial and sentencing. In recognition of the great torts and depredations the man had inflicted upon all organizations he had been a part of, Ragnok graciously offered to delay the application of sentence for up to a full calendar year so that all governments, churches, guilds, schools and chartered Families, could interrogate him while under the effects of the Goblin's version of Veritaserum. Of course, any and all new crimes discovered and proven would be added to the appropriate charge sheets, and the monarch offered the use of his dungeons and executioners to apply the compiled and structured sentences of everybody so the geriatric con-artist couldn't reduce, deflect or escape his due punishment.

Cornelius Fudge was usually a methodical waffler of the first order. Today though, seeing a veritable tidal-wave of support for the Goblin proposal offered out loud in public coming from all walks of life, politics, economy and Faiths, made the decision easy and quick. For the first time in over 75 years, the British Ministry acquiesced the Goblin Nation's prerogative in holding, judging, sentencing and processing the suspect, as long as each implicated organization or Family victimized was allowed a turn at the man's mind to extract his secrets. For the first time in recorded history of the Wizengamot elections, Cornelius Oswald Fudge saw his popular approval ratings climb above the 92% bar and stay there for three weeks when Ragnok published a photo of Dumbledore chained in a Goblin oubliette with four goblin-hounds lurking outside his door, salivating at the thought of his pain and misery.

It was now a good time to be a Goblin, or just a Gringotts employee for other species.

Harry Potter couldn't be any happier, especially since his Heirships and Lordships had been officially recognized by Gringotts' inheritance and ritual departments, and Ragnok himself upon viewing the pensieve memory with the department heads and account managers. The parchments were sent to the Wizarding Ministry of the Welsh Wiccan, and also the White Council, Watchers and Librarians, just to be certain Harry wasn't accosted or hassled without due cause. He may be a child but he had two active lordships on him, a third lordship pending, plus he was Peer of the Realms Britannic as confirmed by Buckingham Palace, so the aurors, hit wizards, Wardens and ICW Enforcers had to be made aware of what they were dicking with, to avoid a diplomatic or judicial incident. Especially since Harry, being an under-age child, had the right to nominate a Goblin warrior as his Champion in case honor duels were asked of him. A small privilege which he immediately accepted and enacted from a list of candidates Ragnok had vetted himself.

Pity the fool who tried that tactic to steal his Lines and Heritages!

With all the accounts and vaults opened up to what was allowed for his age under the Potter and Peverell charters and Gringotts client conventions, Harry could now visit and use most of what he had inherited. If certain objects were still barred from removal from the Family's vault, he could simply pay the bank to make a functioning copy to keep in his trunk, a favorite alternative for precious books that several ministries or councils would want to seize or destroy.

Young Harry was also, in the last week of June, able to have a first video-conference with his blood-oathed godfather, Sirius Orion Black III, the Lord Black, by using the enchanted mirror in the private Master's vault of his trunk. Several of the legal, political and diplomatic chicaneries surrounding Albus Dumbledore had begun to unravel at a fast clip since his transfer to the Goblin cells, so the two relatives were finally able to start exchanging letters via the Gringotts secured mailboxes, and then through the communications mirrors on a fixed schedule. A first live meeting should happen during the summer, at the Great ICW Rotunda in Basel in July, to celebrate Harry's 11th birthday properly, with living family instead of just honored spirits.

Christmas break 1990-91

(Harry Potter - theme)

December 1990 – January 1991  
Multiple locations  
The British Isles & Europa

Harry didn't know yet just how different his Yule season celebrations would be from the past years. And he certainly didn't know how catastrophic the upheaval that would shake the entirety of Magical Britannia, Europa, Slavia and the rest of the ICW members would be. It was like a tremor shook the entire planet all at once because the magnetic poles were resetting and a new Ice Age was dropping on them, all together without warning signs.

The first shock to the system was the public declaration by the Magical Ministry of the Welsh Wiccan community that Albus Dumbledore had taken gravely ill from a heart infarction and all current prognostics were dire. In fact, he was fully crippled all over the right side and not expected to ever recover his mobility or autonomy. Even his right eye and side of mouth were non-functional, thus severely handicapping his spell-casting abilities and legilimancy skills.

The news was published in the Daily Prophet and a live interview with Minister of Magic of the Welsh Wiccan community, Cornelius Oswald Fudge, passed on the Wizarding Wireless. He was accompanied by the Head of Staff for St-Mungo's hospital and Madam Bones of DMLE. What they were saying was rather bland, as in medical reports and the beginnings of an investigation into why Hogwarts staff waited 26 days before asking for outside help when Dumbledore was found by the house-elves, on the 26th of November. Also, the preliminary questioning of the medi-witch and Heads of Houses at the school were raising severe concerns which had just triggered a very large and far-reaching audit of the castle by DMLE and Ministry officials.

On the more useful side of things, his muggle relatives were spontaneously confined by DMLE agents, then scanned & interrogated by senior aurors to find the extension of Dumbledore's manipulations, frauds, abuses and Line-Theft attempts against himself and his Houses. This unavoidably led to the aurors discovering that he spent the last four years of his life as semi-homeless, with his trunk being his portable residence. It was only because he had inherited the trunk through a Gringotts account with all paperwork from his mother, married Lady Potter, on file that the DMLE was prevented from seizing the item or forcing their way into the rooms to search & seize whatever they wanted. Some pink-clad bitch named Dolores Umbridge, who wasn't part of either the DMLE, aurors, Unspeakables or wizarding CPS, suddenly appeared on the premises. She then proceeded to try to verbally bully the child and aurors with fake laws and falsified Ministry documents into confiscating the trunk, or at least letting her have some sort of preponderant authority over what was allowed inside in the name of keeping the country's blood and culture pure and wizardly.

It never had a chance to work, especially not when the goblin account manager and House Potter's newly hired human solicitors arrived during her racially offensive diatribe.

Umbridge was publicly forced to back off in great painful surprise when Harry's solicitor presented the boy's memory in the Wizengamot's projection pensieve, along with a formal complaint for attempted breach of Chartered Family heirloom & residence, plus attempt at theft and censorship of Noble Family Library, and blatant attempt to use powers & authority never assigned to her posting or job description. Harry was immensely gratified to be seated in the Gamot chamber as the memory was played and the case argued, so that he could stand up and ask her to her face if she thought she was doing Dumbledore's mugwumpish bidding, or trying to take over at abusing children from him now that the spot was open.

The uproar of outrage the Warlocks and proxies shouted at the witch was nearly enough for the Chief-Witch, Madam Griselda Marchbanks, to have the meeting vacated and the chamber evacuated by the aurors on sentry duty. In the end of the short trial, the felonious witch was fined 10,000 Galleons, suspended without pay for a month, and lost three years of seniority, which decreased her salary & benefits, but most importantly rendered her unable to hold any 'senior' position in the Ministry or national institutions for at least five years to come.

Minister Fudge was so ill-at-ease to explain why a person purporting to be his particular senior under-secretary and chief of staff for his cabinet had thought it was a good idea to inflict such treatment on any young heir of any house, let alone think it was legal, especially after the recent revelation of serial Line-Theft and assassinations by Dumbledore. Fudge was in such hot water over his ex-subordinate that he had no choice but to dismiss her completely from the Ministry in disgrace, lest he himself become a victim of the seated Warlocks' retaliations. The elections were coming up soon, and any popularity he had garnered by handing Dumbledore over to the Goblins was already dissipated like morning dew in the sunlight. He could not afford any scandals our doubts to his fitness for office, specifically not his morality and sanity. The pink-obsessed witch disappeared from public sight, but would reappear shortly, nastier than ever.

{ HP } --- { Hogwarts is burning! } --- { HP }

The most deplorable situation that Harry had to deal with in July was the emergency meeting of the Wizengamot requested by the Hogwarts Board of Governors, through its chairman Lucius Abraxas Malfoy, Head of Family, Lord Malfoy, Baronet of Wiltshire. The board was to submit its written update on the investigations currently going on inside the venerable castle-school, and make proposals to palliate the mess that the collapse of the administrative and teaching staff had caused.

Unfortunately for Harry, everything seemed to conspire to make him miss the closed-door session, despite that he had an entitled right to sit and vote regardless of age or blood status, due to being the Lord of House Peverell. When your chartered Family is called "Most Venerable" and "Greatly Spiritual" by the legal texts of the nation, you get privileges unlike any other. And when that house is mentioned directly in the constitution of the Wizengamot as being older than the legal existence of Britain as a sovereign country recognized by its neighbors, you get more privileges. One such privilege was that ANY Peverell by Blood-Law inheritance had the right to be present inside the Gamot chamber and speak upon any matters. Further, unlike recently created Families who were less than 1,000 years old, the Peverell had no minimal age limit to receive status as Scion, Heir or Lord, and no voted statute, regular or emergency, could keep the Seated Peverell Lord from voting in the chamber for ALL proposals and matters.

Lets just say a lot of people tried very hard to forget those laws, and make others do too.

That state of mind was the reason why -somebody- lost Harry's summons to the emergency meeting, and then the auror on sentry duty tried desperately to block him from entering the chamber, despite the fact the same man had controlled his identity and let him in just last week for the trial against Umbridge. When reminded forcibly of the facts about the trial's outcome, the man had winced in misery as he realized the power and legal authority the 10 year old wielded through lawyers, Gringotts and his legally, magically empowered titles.

Once seated in the Peverell's historical chair, Harry had to get into a shouting match with the room's junior scribe to be accounted present and voting, since the newbie had never been confronted to the antiquated laws and privileges of Venerable Houses, nor the Peerage of the Realms Britannic despite the plethora of Peers present. All the others were over 21 year of age already, son the scribe had never bothered to control them passed their visible characteristics and presence. It was only the arrival of the Gamot's senior scribe, who knew both Harry's situation and the obsolete laws enacted by his multiple lordships, that prevented the mess from escalating into another trial about Royal Peerage, Entitled Nobility and Blood-Law rights. Now fully seated and named in the scrolls for calling quorum and votes, the honorific 'Warlock' child was trying to relax when he saw something that made him want to throw Hadean pain prayers at the crowd.

Dolores -fucking- Umbridge, dressed as girly-pink as ever, was sitting in all her bactracian glory next to the delegation from the Board of Governors, at the private solicitors' table. In fact, she was giggling like a prepubescent schoolgirl as she tried to stage-whisper something to an elderly Board member that Harry didn't know personally, but recognized from the portfolio his account managers had prepared. Lord Myzere wasn't a noble or member of the rich elites, but he was Pureblood from a respected Wizarding House. He had been close to the Death Eaters until Voldemort went off the rails in the late 1970's, when he distanced himself publicly. Harry could respect the High Traditionalist mindset as he shared it, but racism and incestuous retardedness he would not even contemplate. This man was at least an adversary, if not an outright enemy.

Chief-witch Griselda Marchbanks had been the head of the Wizarding Department of Schooling until Albus Dumbledore had been declared medically unfit for service. She had been the first to put in practice the new laws recently voted just after Dumbledore's first arrest that stated nobody could hold multiple elected, nominative, judicial or governmental postings alongside other bureaucratic or corporate jobs. When you have one charge of public trust, you devote yourself to that one task and nothing else, except your Chartered Family obligations. So Madam Marchbanks was now solely the chief-witch of the Wizengamot, and several dozen other postings had so been vacated and refilled in the months since last November. Banging her gavel with alacrity and severity as she called for order and decorum, the elderly woman showed clearly why she deserved the post rather than anybody else.

Once the chamber was seated at rest and accounted, the Hogwarts Board of Governors began to submit its findings, and it was a hecatomb that scared many with how far-reaching things went. Only the fact that most in the chamber had been cursed or poisoned with loyalty elixirs by Dumbledore to go against their conscience and self-interest kept anybody from wishing for a Time-Turner to go back before the revelations, when events and life were so much simpler. It was a good thing that all voting members had been scanned and vetted by the Department of Mysteries as being autonomous of free will at last, and that they all wore their Familial sigil ring. The protections on those artifacts should protect the parliamentarians against further attempts at manipulating their minds and actions, for now.

The report about the situation at the school was such;

x----------x

Professor Minerva McGonagall would not be able to return to teaching in September, because she was too traumatized and emotionally destroyed to make a stable administrator. She had been mind-raped repeatedly, had compulsions implanted in her mind via Imperius, had been obliviated hundreds of times over decades, and been severely drugged for obedience, loyalty, subservience, ignoring violence done to children, ignoring bullying and tolerating the abuses of authority that Dumbledore and 'high officials' did in the name of their jobs. Also, the healers from St-Mungo's determined that the blood-bound loyalty potions in her system would take nearly a full year to finish metabolizing, so putting her in authority over children or any sort of teaching job was not a good idea. What she would decide to do with her life when that year was done was still very much unknown, even by her.

x----------x

Professor Pomona Sprout was lucky she had been deemed inoffensive and unimportant by Dumbledore who was as bigoted against Hufflepuffs, and generally self-blinded as they came. He had only poisoned her with small doses of weak loyalty elixir to make sure she never called him out on his tolerance of bullying and violence towards those students he himself was targeting for long-term exploitation. Her mind and body were already clear, and she was fit for full duties. She would be back at Hogwarts in September, but as a teacher only.

x----------x

Professor Filius Flitwick could thank his bi-racial parentage and goblin ancestors for having been left mostly alone. He had received small amounts of loyalty, befuddlement and forgetfulness elixirs over the last forty years, but had metabolized all of it so fast that Dumbledore had to lay back for fear of his manipulations becoming visible to the half-goblin. Further, his links with the Goblin Nation and Gringotts bank were dangerous in a way that the aurors would never be, so the old magus had to be extra careful and distant towards the charms expert. When he realized his potions were no longer working beyond half duration and one third of strength, he had to let it go and work around the part-goblin lest he be discovered. Flitwick would be able to return in September, but as a teacher only.

x----------x

Potion master Severus Tobias Snape, Lord-Elect Prince, was being kept in St-Mungo's Janus Thickey ward for long-term spell damage victims, and would not be able to work anywhere but his room for the foreseeable future. The man had been quite literally enslaved since he was eleven years old, when he first set foot in Hogwarts. Dumbledore had used an unholy mixture of alchemies, curses, legilimancy attacks to reprogram his Inner-World and Identity, had obliviated hundreds of his memories, and confounded hundreds more.

He used the young man's emotional instability and social loneliness to commit Line-Theft when he told him that his grand-parents, the Lord and Lady of House Prince, had disinherited him then Cast him Out of the Family due to his half-blood status and recommendations from James, Heir of Potter, and Sirius, Heir of Black. When young 15 year old Severus signed with a blood quill the Gringotts parchment that stated he understood the terms of his disownment, it was actually a fake crafted by Dumbledore who dispelled the phantom text to let the real document become visible to present at the Ministry via lawyers. It was actually a fraud contract declaring that Severus acknowledged unspecified debts, towards a confidential Pureblood patron. It declared that because he had not been able to fulfill the terms of patronage, and thus reimbursed the debts by handing over the entire Prince legacy that wasn't bound by Blood-Law or inheritance ritual, like the actual title or the land plots.

The potion master was mentally broken and emotionally destroyed, and then his magicks were unstable because Dumbledore had manipulated him into pronouncing a magical vow that was now proven to be unrealizable, so he was suffering Oath-Breaking backlash. The only way to save his life and sanity was to keep him charmed comatose, with an automated dialysis perfusion of 0,001% Squibbing Oil given by intravenous line, directly into the liver, until the backlashes were finished passing. At this point, not a single healer, mind healer or apothecary wanted to declare any prognostic about his chances of living, let alone coming out sane, functional or magically able. This also had the problem of putting the Prince heritage in abeyance until an Heir could be found or declared.

x----------x

Medi-witch Poppy Pomphrey would be kept in the hospital for the foreseeable future as she had several curses and compulsions buried deeply in her psyche, besides a stronger variant of loyalty elixir. She was awake, aware and functional, but severely depressive and had tried to self-injure several times already.

It was thought to be a mechanism Dumbledore put into his compulsions to destroy her credibility by looking insane in case she was called to testify against him. Another troubling situation was that each time the healers had asked her opinion about the other teachers in the beds near her, she had either spoken nonsense, lied flat out, or told them to ask Dumbledore because he was an alchemist, not her.

Even when she was asked about children's basic health issues that she encountered every year for decades, she had been indecisive or given answers that were just slightly off-kilter. Another troubling find was that she had been mentally programmed to give different qualities of attention and care according to the Hogwarts House the person had been sorted in during their school years, and to treat non-Hogwarts educated people with about 75% of what optimal care was supposed to be. She was made to pamper Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs like they were fragile jewels, treat Ravenclaws at par, and treat Slytherins at 66% or less of normal, and to be rude about it.

As time went on, the mind-healers were finding more and deeper layers to the compulsions and damages done to her Inner-World and Identity. She was clearly not fit for any job or posting, especially any school or child healing tasks.

x----------x

Librarian Irma Pince was one of the worse cases of direct, repeated Imperius victimization that the aurors and mind-healers had witnessed in their lives, including the Blood Purity War and the troops of Gellert Grindelwald during the muggle World War II. Irma Pince was also the only human to have been so thoroughly mentally programmed that the compulsions, obliviations and false memories were spread throughout her Identity, Dreamscape and Inner-World, to the extent that nobody was able to figure out where the person ended and the heuristics matrix took over.

She was like a superbly configured flesh golem or homonculus; visibly indistinguishable from normal humans, but the mind, memories and magicks were under enslavement at 85%., leaving her only 15% of free will for her daily routines. She had particularly strong loyalty, obedience, subservience, willpower erosion, temper worsening and patience limitation alchemic elixirs still percolating inside as she had been dosed every month, despite the fact these could last up to a year with how strong they were prepared. Dumbledore absolutely wanted NOTHING about the magical communities outside of Wizarding Britain to pollute Hogwarts' library, and even less about hybrid or non-human species being intelligent enough to be treated as more than just creatures.

The only non-human species who were still present in the library were the Goblins, the mermen of Black Lake at the foot of the school, and Veela since a few of England's wizarding families had intermarried with some, in the distant past. Every other species was declared a 'dark' or 'grey' creature to be feared and avoided, with precious few exceptions like the phoenix and unicorn who were deemed 'Of the Light' because Dumbledore had a phoenix familiar, and the Forbidden Forest had unicorns right next to the children. The equines were one of the five basic wand cores used by humanity, so forbidding children to learn about them would be truly ludicrous. That, and the Ollivander Family would scalp his beard, braid it into a whip and flog some common sense into him if he ever tried to harm or speak ill of unicorns, let alone bar knowledge of them.

Amongst the many crimes Dumbledore had done was to use Irma Pince as unpaid labor to evaluate and repair any books or scrolls he brought her, then have her be his anonymous intermediary in the black markets for antiquities where those texts he didn't want were sold. This was how the school's library slowly lost nearly 40% of its total collection in the last 63 years, since the process began the first year that Pince began to work. As she was new, nobody was familiar with her temperament therefore Albus was free to modify her drastically without fear of revelation. He had exploited and abused her since.

x----------x

Keeper of Grounds and Keys Rubeus Hagrid was found to be a victim of serial mind-rape, had severe limitations on his personality, memories, mind and magicks installed deeply into his Identity, and had been dosed weekly with loyalty, obedience, docility and subservience elixirs for most of his life since he entered Hogwarts in 1938.

Unlike any other staffer, he had also been implanted micro-wands made mundane spider chitin tubes filled with Dumbledore's beard-hair filaments soaked in house-elf blood to prevent from triggering the wards of the buildings Hagrid would visit during his life. This extraordinary step was necessary because Hagrid's physiology had the strength and endurance to metabolize Dumbledore's best alchemies in one tenth of the time it took the humans, or roughly half the time it took Flitwick to do the same. Also, as a half-giant, Rubeus was naturally extremely resistant to most forms of wand-cast mind-magicks or controls, thus requiring a truly esoteric method to leash him into slavery.

Because he was both afraid and jealous of his many great strengths, Dumbledore targeted him from childhood for binding and limiting so that he not become a threat to the almight and authority of himself. That was why Albus took the drastic action of manipulating Armando Dippet into expulsing Hagrid even though he knew for a fact that fifth year Prefect Tom Riddle had not seen anything that linked Hagrid's -illegal- acromantula pet to the death of Myrtle Warren. Seeing him expelled, wand snapped and penniless in the street was the first step of the half-giant's life-long enslavement to appease the paranoid fears of Dumbledore.

The complex set of mental programs, poisons and implants had been too much drain upon his magick and life-force to survive the removal and weaning process at St-Mungo's. Hagrid died in service of Wizarding Britannia and was given a simple but serene funeral by those professors and ex-students able to attend him.

x----------x

Caretaker Argus Filtch was never going to return to work in any job whatsoever. The poor old man was found to have been a semi-spell-user of Essence specializing in scriptworkes and hedge-crafting that Dumbledore had rendered squib during his first Line-Theft, a century ago. He was initially a Scion from the House of Ahronnack who got all of his monetary and estate legacy not bound by Blood-Law or rituals stolen by Albus when the felon was only fifteen years old.

Over the decades, Dumbledore had kept Filtch at hand as some sort of living trophy, and as a lab rat to test his alchemies until they were properly attuned for the victim of the moment. It so averred that the part-Kneazle Misses Norris was actually his familiar bonded under The Old Ways, and she had been victimized by Dumbledore as well. He used the cat hybrid as lab test subject, put several repulsion and compulsion curses on her to make the students malign and harm her, and severely bound the magical link between Argus and her so they couldn't draw strength from each other to fight off his curses and potions.

The man was presently in the Janus Thickey ward, in a medically maintained coma because he had stopped breathing when Albus Dumbledore was read the Act of Accusation for Line-Theft against House Ahronnack. It was probably a hidden oath or contingency against court testimony that Dumbledore had put in him long ago. No healer wanted to risk their career by speaking aloud a prognostic on the matter, nor about if he would awaken. The cat had fallen ill along her master but had not survived, which worsened the human's condition immediately as he felt he death and Passage. He had nothing left to live for, and nobody thought he'd ever awaken.

x----------x

The most egregious case of malfeasance from Dumbledore was Quirinus Quirrell who was victim of a possession by a malevolent specter picked up during his vacations in Albania. The castle wards against such events should have triggered and isolated the poor man so that he was given help. However, most of the wardstones were so badly maimed or rewritten by Dumbledore's inept attempts at invisible dominance that less than 15% of the functions still worked at all. Most of the venerable wards that had made the school's reputation for safety were off-line or destroyed when Dumbledore realized he would never control them, and he also needed to sign the blood-oath to have sufficient access the modify the settings, which he would never willingly do in his life. He preferred to de-power or destroy the schemes he wasn't able to hijack to his will, leaving the venerable institution almost bare of shields or detectors.

As such, Quirrell's health issues were spotted by the healers during his preliminary screening interrogation with the aurors. The specter inside him fought to get away and actually tried to posses two different people before being chased out of the castle grounds, instead of being contained and exorcised by the wards, as they had been designed to do when they were built.

As a result of this criminally depraved act against the common health and safety of Hogwarts, professor Quirrell, junior auror Malice Irene Selwyn, Lady-Elect of House Selwyn, and master medi-wizard Horace Thespis Delson, have died in service to Wizarding Britannia. They were brought to the DMLE morgue for secured autopsies by the Unspeakables, and given honorable funeral rites by their families, for those who had any left.

x----------x

Professor Sybill Trelawney was both a criminal fraud and a victim in the circumstance.

She had been near homelessness as she was deeply indebted but without gainful employ. She saw and advert in the Daily Prophet about Hogwarts searching for a Divinations professor, to replace the person going to retirement. She had no Third-Eye opened, and not much skill in divinatory arts at all to be frankly honest, but she had an ancestor who was famous at it; Cassandra Trelawney, an Oracle of confirmed Gift who served the Church of Cosme.

So, she obtained an interview with Albus Dumbledore in his brother Aberforth's dingy bar, in the early evening just after dinner. She presented herself in her most Bohemian clothes, embalmed in incense smoke and herb oils to affect an air of mysticism and esoterism that old men of Dumbledore's generation have always fallen for like the superstitious suckers they are.

She gave a false prophecy.

She acted like a Pinewood Studios pro in a classic James Bond movie.

She did like the Oracle woman played by Jane Seymour, in 'Live and Let Die', from her youth in 1973. That was her role model, when she was doing an audition for a job. She put on her atours and glamours, colored bead shawl and tinted round glasses with sparkling runes in the lenses, and perfumed herself with diluted confounding and emotionality elixirs to manipulate the senses of the audience seated within ten feet of her stage.

And that fateful evening, Albus Dumbledore was her exclusive audience at a private séance. She read the Tarot to predict for England great turmoils and dark mists of desperate loss, before could be found a Beacon of Pure Light in the far: Dumbledore himself. She had used cards marked with invisible sigils that only the charmed lenses in her glasses could see so she could use some basic sleigh-of-hands to shuffle and pass the cards to her needs for the Future she wanted to pronounce. It was always vital to cater to the specific desires of the audience seated before you, if you wanted to get paid and have return customers in your boudoir.

After that, she had faked reading floating holy glyphs in the smoke of the censer she had brought, when it fact they were simple illusions she had programmed to react only to her aura so that it wouldn't trigger by accident. She had put in five different patterns, and the false prayer she chanted triggered the pattern fitting what she saw the customer desired to hear.

Then, the job not cinched yet, she had pulled the Full Monty out of her wand. She had done the biggest fake of her life of con-artistery; she managed to fake the pronouncement of a Prophecy.

Given the Blood Purity War in progress at time, and the fact she was great friends -secretly- with Rita Skeeter who was at the beginning of her journalistic career, she had heard a lot of juicy gossip, privileged Ministry informations, and frankly illegal classified auror reports, from her old childhood friend. Sybill had used a conglomeration of three dozen sources to manufacture the utterly falsified "Prophecy of the Savior Child" that would defeat Lord Voldemort, if he were properly guided by the Powers, Magicks and Authority of a wise mentor; Albus Dumbledore.

The poor deluded fraudster could never have divined in her life the true nature of Dumbledore as the worse predator and killer to ever disgrace Wizarding Britain, not even to save herself.

Albus immediately and without warning or forethought attacked her with legilimancy, but not to verify her honesty or find hidden details of her Prophetic Gift. No, she had tagged him quite well, when she profiled his mindset in preparation for her con. He was a superstitious, credulous fool who believed dearly that the Multiverse and Pantheons of the Divines had -something- of great and extraordinary portents in store for him, and his devout followers. The moment the false tale of Prophetic do-gooding had left her lips, the vainglorious, vapidly narcissistic old cretin had jumped on the one chance to prove his mentally deluded beliefs of superiority to everybody.

So he immediately attacked her mind not to verify, but to establish an external mind-magic lock that was coded to respond only to his Blood and Magic signatures. Her Prophetic Gift and masterful Talents at the divinatory arts and techniques would never again serve anybody but Albus 'The New Merlyn, Regent Archmagus of Britannia' Dumbledore, no matter what came. He also made her sign the cheapskate contract he had prepared in case the job applicant proved just good enough to pass by the Board of Governors, but pliable enough to not need too much of his overstretched attention and schedule.

The morning after, when she presented herself to Hogwarts to prepare the new school year as she had been programmed to do, he began to dose her with particularly strong, Blood-bound elixirs to insure her silence, docility, obedience and limit her magical Talents and Gifts before any audience other than himself. To further her isolation and make certain nobody ever tried to steal his pet Seer, he Imperiused her to drink cheap muggle cooking Sherry by the bottle every day, and used a psychic curse to make her suffer pains equal to a low but constant Cruciatus whenever she was less than 50% drunk on the specified alcohol.

From that point on, she was made to 'Channel' Prophecies or Divine portents at least once a year, because Dumbledore was a needy, tetchy little bitch of a eunuch that absolutely had to have his ego stroked and be confirmed as the biggest, baddest and magikest Warlock in the land. In the years he had hired her, he never saw through her lies and frauds, and never stopped believing that some poor child born at the end of July would be the prophesied 'Savior of Wizarding Light in Britannia, Europa and Slavia' from the foul clutches of the Dreaded Lord of the Darkes, Heir of Slytherin, Voldemort.

Sybill's mind may have been churned to mulch over the years, but she was still remarkably lucid as Dumbledore believed that a true Seer, Oracle or Prophet never controlled when it was that the Divines channeled their message through them, and that the person remembered nothing. All he needed to feel safe, and in sufficient control of her, was to limit her magicks and social exposure so that she didn't wander out of his grasp, or attract the attention of enemies or aurors. Due to this lucidity, she was able to remember several fragments of self-deluded deblaterations that Albus uttered before her, when he needed a human presence to hear and appreciate the truly mind-warping complexities of his schemes and machinations to keep himself at the top of everything magical, political or economical in England and Europe.

It was how she remembered his supposed discovery of Lord Voldemort making 'Horcruxes' when he attacked the Potters, as Albus had planned. He believed it so hard because little Harry and Neville Longbottom were both born on the end of July and came from proven Light Wizarding noble Families, which Albus had somehow imagined was a prerequisite for the Savior Child to be worthy of becoming his apprentice and Martyr of England. Sybill never gave him names or details other than "a child born at the end of July", without saying any gender or what year or epoch they would be born in. Dumbledore imagined everything else on his own, and then fomented the devastation of two Lineages without external prompting.

So, the aurors and DMLE now had in hand a very thick addition to the already massive folio concerning the investigations of Dumbledore's crimes against Harold Jamieson Evans Potter, newly minted Lord Peverell, Lord Potter, and Heir Ascendant of Black, Peer of the Realms.

It was also why the Unspeakables wanted to speak to Harry in the bowels of the Department of Mysteries, preferably without lawyers and certainly no Goblins, so he would be completely at their mercy as they charted the course for "Britain's Greater Good". Thankfully, the Goblins and none of the titled noble Houses had let that abuse of power and station in the Ministry pass by unchallenged. The Unspeakables were told, and shown, with Umbridge's trial that Harry would NOT be anybody's pet victim again in his life. Plus the fact that Harry's famous scar had been examined, surgically emptied of cursed wooden residues from the exploding nursery room furniture, and healed in a way that left no scars at all. There had never been any horcrux in the boy's face, just some splinters contaminated by negative energy that struck him when the dresser detonated from the backlash of the protections Lady Potter had placed around the crib. According to the Soul Stones inside Gringotts, the Dread Lord Voldemort, born as Tom Marvolo Riddle Jr, was well and truly dead, not in suspended animation, not a wraith, and not coming back. Well, unless he had hidden a phylactery while turning himself into a lich or lich-lord, but those things could not be scanned from afar, and the soul stone would go dark if it was done.

Whether Harry's hard-earned peace and safety from harmful tests and rites stayed true remained to be seen, as the Unspeakables were secretly plotting dastardly and frankly... Well... Unspeakable things, yes. That's what they were plotting. And, they weren't alone in wanting ill luck and plagues upon the combined Houses of Harry Potter, so Time alone would tell.

x----------x

Professor Rolanda Hooch who taught flight and refereed Quidditch had been potioned for loyalty and a very low level of attention and reaction towards violence, bullying and children being injured. She had also been programmed to be sullen, distant and uninterested in the lives and welfare of anybody but her own family, most of which had died during the Blood Purity War. She would be fine come September, and since her responsibilities and authority had always been limited, the healers saw no problems with sending her back to work.

x----------x

The other teachers were victims of lazy efforts at control spread out over decades, being given loyalty, befuddlement or forgetfulness elixirs according to whatever Dumbledore thought needed to be hidden from the aurors and open public. Most of them had already metabolized the drugs for more than fourteen months by now, and were not showing symptoms of active programming, although each had been mind-raped repeatedly, from their time as students and throughout their careers. Those who would not return in September had made the choice for themselves, not because of medical advice or pressures from the Board.

Charity Burbage of Muggle Studies chose to leave for other employment, preferably in private tutoring rather than a public or group setting. Given how out of date he curriculum was, and that she hadn't seen a muggle since she had visited a squib aunt in Manchester at age 13, it wasn't seen as a damaging choice. She would have been replaced come September 1991 anyways.

Septima Vector of Arithmancy, Bathsheda Babbling of Ancient Runes, Aurora Sinistra of Astronomy and Sylvanus Kettleburn of Care of Magical Creatures, chose to return to their posts in September 1991, but only with conditions and assurances about the castle getting new wards that would actually function, and the true salaries and benefits that their contracts stipulated, with all arrears and legal fees covered by the school. The requests had already been accepted by the Board and the Ministry's Department of Schooling.

x----------x

It had taken two hours for the Board of Governors to submit and read abstracts of the report from the partial investigations. Multiple deaths, multiple comas and handicapped victims that would never recover fully. Several professors who were seen as heroes in their fields were compromised to the point they could barely function as muggle teachers for a regular high school class. Most of the non-academic staff was decimated, except for Rolanda Hooch who had never been all that active or important in the school anyways, so a pitiful victory that was.

{ HP } --- { Help! Hogwarts is still ablaze! } --- { HP }

And then there were all the collateral discoveries that worsened the case even more.

All the mess about Harry's scar and -NO!- it wasn't a horcrux, or phylactery, or whatever the Hells you thought it was. He didn't even have a damned scar anymore! It had just been contaminated grime that shrapnelized when Voldemort got vaporized by Lily's booby trap. Or James', the aurors hadn't been sure than and still weren't. But the boy didn't have a Dark Lord embryo in his cranium, so all the fucking shyte that Albus "I know everything!" Dumbledore put him through was for a big fat nothing.

Rubeus Hagrid had been hiding and helping a growing colony of Amazonian Acromantulas in the Forbidden Forest since 1943, or 48 years. The worse part was that Dumbledore had known full well, but used the health and safety of his pet's brood to emotionally blackmail Hagrid into cooperating when the alchemies were wearing out too fast to be safely reapplied. If the grounds keeper wanted to keep his arachnid friends alive and happy, then he had to cooperate with Albus for everything asked. The truly evil part of this was that Acromantulas may be able to speak with humans and other species, that didn't make their mindset any less alien. They were both incestuous and unattached to their kindred. They were predatory in a way that was murderous and cannibalistic without consideration or remorse, and they admitted it openly as they saw no trouble or immorality in this way of feeding. In their five decades of presence, the spiders had killed-off half the unicorns, a quarter of the centaurs, and exterminated approximately thirty-two species of animals, while endangering fifty-seven others and forcing nearly three hundred types of creatures to migrate out of the forest to keep their kinds alive.

One of the further crimes of Albus Dumbledore discovered was that he forced Hagrid to collect the excess silk from the Acromantulas' secondary nests and aerial roadways to be brought back to Hogwarts. Inside the castle's lower dungeons, he had tasked several of the oldest and least mobile house-elves with steeping, cleaning, spinning and weaving the silk into commercial rolls of 200 pounds that he sold at a good profit on the black market. He dodged the permits and taxes on sales and revenues, and it all went into his pockets as he never gave the school, forest preservation fund or Hagrid anything of the proceeds.

Besides this abomination of an environmental hecatomb that threatened the reliable provisioning of food markets and apothecaries all over Britain and the world in coming years, it also created an imbalance in the magicks of the Laand that was in desperate need of druids and geomancers to correct. It would take a Grand Ritual of Antiquity to set right what was damaged, or else the diseases and cursed magicks would continue to spread through the forest and out into the rest of Scotland by traveling through the three Ley Lines under Hogwarts. The purulent tumor that Dumbledore had accidentally let happen was a genuine threat to the magical and ecological balance of the entire planet, if given three or four centuries to degenerate further.

Then, of course, were the Centaurs who could decide to stop being isolationists long enough to drag Wizarding Britain before the ICW Assembly to have them tried for accidental genocide and warfare through criminal negligence in their stewardship of Hogwarts, plus of course the utter lack of supervision and oversight where Dumbledore was concerned. As he had been Headmaster, Chief Warlock of the Gamot, and British representative as well as Supreme Mugwump at the ICW, that could become quite the kettle of fish to fry. For once, the Board of Governors had managed to bypass their usual disdain for part-humans and non-humans by inviting the leader of the Centaur Herd at the first submission of the draft report, to show good will and try to find remedies without dragging the ICW Enforcers into it. Except for the accursed Acromantula colony; everybody in the Gamot chamber was of the opinion that the heavily armed and armored Enforcers and their trained Battle-Basilisk familiars would do a better and faster job than the British aurors and hit wizards put together.

x----------x

It was discovered, during a thorough search of his personal living quarters, that the old bastard had been stealing the research product of several professors by obliviating and confounding them to forget they had done the work. He made them think he had done most of everything and they only served as revision committee when they were free. Thusly, he put nearly four hundred discoveries in transfiguration, transmutation, potions, alchemy and arithmancy to his name by depositing the patents at the Wizarding Ministry without contest by the real authors. Severus Snape had seen nearly two-thirds of his life's work defrauded and extorted from his hands in this manner since he set foot in Hogwarts. The same could be said for Minerva McGonagall, Pomona Sprout and Septima Vector.

On top of damaging the ecology and stealing their studies from the professors, he was also systematically underpaying everybody by ungodly percentages and pocketing wholesale the salaries of Cuthbert Binns and Rubeus Hagrid without telling them.

Professor Binns was a ghost, an honored dead for several decades since before Albus set foot in the castle, so he wasn't supposed to be paid anything but mysteriously got paid a full salary with benefits and pension in the accounting books. Nobody had figured out where the monies went.

Hagrid was to be enslaved and kept poor and destitute at all costs, so Dumbledore fudged his hiring contract by making the gentle giant-kin believe that the small hut and food he got from the castle were an alms for his "unnecessary but appreciated service" to the school's community. Since he was forcibly made to believe his choices were this menial labor, homeless vagrancy or prison in Azkaban, Hagrid had agreed without being mentally able to look further.

Severus Snape and Poppy Pomphrey had spent thousands of hours at preparing potions vials that disappeared to be sold on the black market, just as Pomona Sprout had worked her fingers to the bones in the greenhouses and fields to produce high quality herbs that were also absconded for resell in back-alleys and dank sewer chambers.

x----------x

By pure accident, the Unspeakables that were helping with breaking the illegal wards around Dumbledore's office and quarters found his poor Fire Phoenix, held captive inside a stasis bubble crafted out of Laen volcanic glass. The magical crystalline material was weird in that it became super-enduring at any level of heat or flames, but became brittle like eggshell in sub-zero temperature. The perfect prison to keep a phoenix between bouts of poisoning it with alchemies, implanting the Imperius in its mind via legilimancy, and using micro-wands like those found in Hagrid to insure control over long ranges and anchor permanent Dark blood-wards against divinations and scrying.

This gave Albus the perfect vehicle for instantly sending or fetching illegal parcels, sending booby trapped mail to unsuspecting people, and he had even trained the bird to listen to his mental imagery to find and steal small objects for him. In many cases where a person had lost a family heirloom left out of their wall safe for a few minutes, or an important letter had been misplaced, it was actually Fawkes stealing things while Dumbledore piloted him remotely like an animated flesh puppet.

The poor magical entity was in St-Mungo's research lab, being treated as a VMW (Very Magickal Warlock) with all the regards due to entitled nobility. Nobody knew if he would awaken, nor what state he'd be in if he ever did. For that crime alone, the desecration of a creature of Pure Goodness, its enslavement by Dark means, plus forcing it to commit legally punishable crimes, Dumbledore was already facing three death penalties right there.

x----------x

The goals of Albus Dumbledore were always to make money and dodge all aurors or regulatory departments, so that the unlawful and immoral profits ended in his pockets. Ever since he had been born as a pauper's second son in a rural farmstead, and a half-blood at that, Albus had been obsessed with becoming rich, famous and powerful above everyone he could perceive or become aware of by reputation. And like all con-men, his criminalities and depravities in the name of money and self-importance knew no bounds in this world or the next.

{ HP } --- { Is it over yet? / No, it is not. } --- { HP }

After five long hours of reporting, the entire Wizengamot chamber sat in stunned silence, as if someone had dropped a sleep drug grenade in the middle of the floor to knock-out everybody, all at once. Only the animated dicta-quills were still making noise but were unheard as they toiled under silencing wards to not bother the Warlocks and Ladies in their deliberations.

Chief-Witch Marchbanks took in a deep steadying breath, before asking of Lord Malfoy, "What is the status of the school as it stands? And will it be able to reopen at all or partially, come the new year? We need to know now, so that the families can find other institutions or hire at-home tutors until this is all resolved, physically, legally and magically."

Lucius Malfoy stood from his chair at the Board's table and responded in measured words, wearing a grave expression on his face. "We honestly don't know if operating Hogwarts for the coming year is either safe, feasible or even desirable, with the limited staff on hand. Firstly, we have measured the workload of all administrators, heads of Houses and teachers, to figure out by how much they were being overworked or underpaid. On average, each employee was being made to produce three to five times what their list of tasks & responsibilities officially required, while at the same time being paid between 85% and 65% of what the -unmodified- contracts for a single job stipulate. In this, Dumbledore milked them like cows, by all four teats, and left nothing for them or the students after that."

Gesturing carefully and decoratively with his gloved hands, the Chairman of the Board explained in detail; "Minerva McGonagall was exploited shamelessly for decades as sole teacher of transfiguration, master developer of alterative magicks, Head of Gryffindor, and Deputy Headmaster, but paid only 85% of the base salary of a regular professor, with all benefits and her pension fund halved, and most patents or copyrights stolen. Severus Snape was teacher of potions, resident master brewer, resident apothecary, master alchemical developer, Head of Slytherin, and Deputy of financial affairs to Gringotts. He was paid only 85% of the base salary, all benefits and pension halved, 90% of patents and copyrights stolen, and 98% of his apothecary production was stolen for black market resell. Plus, of course, Dumbledore used him as his spy inside the Dark Lord's ranks during the Blood Purity War, without a copper Knut for his sacrifices. Pomona Sprout was teacher of herbology, master developer of herbology techniques, master breeder of new magical plants, manager of the greenhouses, responsible for stocking the vegetal potions components warehouses, responsible for half of the foodstuffs used daily, and Head of Hufflepuff. She was paid only 85% of the base salary of a regular professor, with all benefits and her pension fund halved, and 90% of patents or copyrights stolen. Filius Flitwick was teacher of charms and Head of Ravenclaw, paid at 75% of the regular salary, with all benefits and pension fund limited at 33% of expected. For the others, their workloads are just a bit worse than written in their contracts, or else Dumbledore deemed they were useless to his plans so they got paid 65% of what should have been, with no benefits or pension allocated."

Making a wider, more expansive gesture of his left hand, Lord Malfoy spoke through tight lips and clenched features. "For those who ignore it, and in the spirit of open declaration of vested interests of my Family, the celebrated master of Potions, Alchemy and Apothecary Arts, professor Severus Tobias Snape, the Lord-Elect Prince in Abeyance, is the godfather of my only son, the Heir Presumptive of House Malfoy. I am personally aggrieved by the crimes, depravities, seditions and treasons committed by Albus Dumbledore, but I am trying to function objectively nonetheless. It is in this objective, arithmantic approach to the situation, that we have come to the following conclusions about the internal workings of the school. Please peruse the following charts and itemized lists, passed by the Board's official solicitors."

Once everybody had a stapled folio in hand, Lord Malfoy affected as dignified a pose as he could, then explained the reality of what remained of Hogwarts today. "While the investigations are still ongoing at the DMLE, ICW and Gringotts, we can already surmise the following problems to overcome. We need a Headmaster that can be trusted and relied upon, and a method to insure that the contracts and oaths are never again bypassed. We need a Deputy Headmaster who will have conditions, contracts and oaths exactly similar to the Headmaster. We need a Deputy Accountant delegated to Gringotts, bound as the first two. We need a medi-witch or healer that is qualified and bound with oaths that cannot be perverted or bypassed by the person or external forces. We will need a dedicated apothecary to produce the potions for internal uses, as well as manage the outside sales that are supposed to happen. Likewise with a dedicated farmer or rancher to handle the vegetation crops and livestock's to be sold outside. We absolutely need four distinct Heads of Houses that are not admins or teachers, or infirmary personnel, or cooks, or custodians, or anything else than Head of House, responsible for the welfare of the students and relations with their families."

Taking a sip of cold water from his goblet, Lord Malfoy pursued; "We would need to have a few more house-elves, but do not need people to be kitchen staff, serving staff, custodian, disciplinarian or grounds-keeper, since these functions were never written in the Hogwarts Charter, and were never necessary. Firstly, corporal punishment was historically carried out by the Heads of House or Headmaster, but never any other personnel, thus a dedicated disciplinarian is a nonsense and should not be employed. Also, historically, detentions were supervised by the teachers who gave them to avoid kicking students out of class to dump them on others without personal involvement. We strongly recommend this becomes the norm again. The other tasks have always been the province of the house-elves who take tremendous joy and pride in feeding the future of our nation and partner countries that send their children here. I see no reason to alter this proven method, nor to asperse insults upon the elves by taking away their tasks and usefulness, which few among us would have the amount of daily magicks needed to do."

The white-blond haired lord finished the demoralizing report "As you can see, we need several people, on average three, to replace each professor we are losing, plus a few more permanent employees to equilibrate the workloads equitably amongst the entire staff. And that is to say nothing of the costs and delays implied by the analysis, retro-engineering and integral replacement of the entire ward scheme, from the monoliths up, because of centuries of idiotic Headmasters trying to configure the ward layers to permit, bolster or ignore their pet projects of the moment. Already, the Unspeakables are talking about de-powering the grid by blocking the Mana Source under the school's Power Sink. Be aware that the ward-masters of Gringotts, contracted as second opinion to validate the analysis, have agreed with this prevision because of the enormous difficulties in repairing the damaged stones and channels, and the non-viable financial montage that would result from renovating instead of creating from scratch."

Chief-witch Marchbanks asked in hesitant tones, "I can see that the new personnel and job allocations will multiply the yearly budgets, but will the revenues suffice or will we have to raise tuition, or even install a new support tax? And what are the price estimates for the wards?"

Shaking his head negatively, Lord Malfoy replied carefully "The tuition should not need to be adjusted since several irregularities were found in the accounts by the Board, DMLE and Gringotts who are all still hard at work, digging through the morass. However, king Ragnok has given us a tentatively posited opinion that if the hundreds of frauds and thefts perpetrated by Dumbledore had not pauperized the school so, the revenues from the percentage taken on all patents and copyrights resulting from research would be a considerable yearly intake. Plus the sales of raw or processed herbs, potions & apothecary craftings, rare components harvested from the Forbidden Forest with great care, and legally certified copies of the library's exclusive books, all delivered by house-elf to stay fresh/hot and on time, would make a small fortune every year. Technically, king Ragnok and his accountants do not understand HOW or WHY the school should be insolvent, nor unable of material autonomy. It was built on the model of Catholic walled abbeys prevalent in the epoch, a millenia ago, so that production of foods, medicines, weapons, clothes and erudition were all done inside the safety of the castle. The Hogwarts designed by the Four Founders and given the Royal Writ in 1002ad is not the Hogwarts we have known for the last three hundred years. But, to answer your other question, it is on the last sheet of the folio."

Madam Marchbanks and the seated Ladies, Lords and Proxies turned the sheets until they had the ward rebuilding projects' draft estimates in sight. The immediate gasps of fear or outrage rang out the moment the people could intellectualize the magnitude of the numbers lined up.

Old Warlock Tiberius Ogden, Head of Family, Lord of Ogden, put his wand to the crest engraved in the wooden banister in front of his chair to signal the Chief-Witch that he wished to address the subject at hand. Given the permission, he whispered harshly in the dead silence that filled the chamber. "Are these valid? Can we trust these numbers or will they suddenly grow like Devil's Snare in a dark cellar? Because I don't think that we could have that much money in our hands unless we sold six Noble Houses at auction for at least 66% of their book-worth."

Nodding forlornly, Lord Malfoy sighed deeply as he declared "No, I can't give you that guarantee, Lord Ogden. As previously stated, these are only preliminary estimates done by eye, not even actual first drafts after divinations, geomancy and scriptworkes engineering were done. It says, and I sadly quote, 'A best guess of 19 million Galleons over three years to build new, or above 27 million Galleons over seven years for a renovation of the original Ember monoliths and Mana source channels respecting historic accuracy and emulating the traditional crafting style' as Head Unspeakable Saul Croaker said."

Madam Bones glared through her heavily enspelled monocle as she wanded the calling crest, then harshly questioned Malfoy; "And why, pray tell, is the price difference so large? Is it not the same space being utilized, and in the same manner?"

Shaking his head, Lord Malfoy countered "From what the Unspeakables and Gringotts have explained to us, if they build new, they can use modern techniques that use less space and channel Powers more efficiently in small crystal tubes, instead of wide masonry pipes that spread around liquid Primal Essaence as the ancient system does. Repairing the old system however, would mean cutting the castle horizontally to lift it off the foundations where most of the devices, meaning the fabled mythalar pillars, power sink and mithril lances, were buried without physical access. This was done to keep the tremendous radiations and acidic vapors of condensed Primal Essaence limited to the chambers and channels of the ward control grid. And also to keep thieves and idiots from damaging the ward matrix, which obviously failed anyways. Still, rebuilding the original means using the original methods, tools, materials and staying inside the alchemical and energy limits of such techniques, which I remind you are a millenia out of date. Thus the wildly different prices."

Several in the chamber held their forehead or put their face in both hands as the whispers of prayers to the Divines abounded around the debate hall.

{ HP } --- { Are you fucking kidding me, you accursed twits? } --- { HP }

As the murmurs of anguish and distress abated across the debate hall, Harry Potter touched his wooden spoon to the signal crest in front of him, much to the amusement, or scorn, of the Warlocks in neighboring chairs. Being recognized by the Chief-Witch, he asked his question, to the great interest of the assembly.

"My Lord Malfoy, cousin by alliance of my Black Blood-Law, could you explain to us HOW the successive headmasters were able to usurp or damage the ward scheme and devices, if they were sealed away in foundation levels that had no physical access? I seem to find a logical impossibility, in this report. Did they apparate or gate inside the spaces? Or have a house-elf deliver their nefarious tools to remote control them afterwards?"

Lucius Malfoy appeared to ignore the plebeian whispers about his family affairs coming from all over the chamber while at the same time studiously observing and memorizing the reactions caused by the juvenile Lord's speech. He had just recognized the familial standing and alliance that had been wrought between their Houses in a manner of The Old Ways, in abidance of the Pureblood and High Traditionalist Darkes cultures. The tizzy emanating from select parts of the assembly were a balm on his wounded heart that helped to regain strength enough to face the rest of the crimes and personal offenses suffered from the sapping of Hogwarts by Dumbledore.

Bowing at the waist with his left hand at his left hip and his right hand resting atop his serpent-headed cane in the manner of High Lords of Magick, Lucius replied Harry politely with a small, knowing smirk that made even more whispers pass around the Light and Neutral factions of the political spectrum, while the Darke and Darkness groups were wondering about the shift.

"Your question is neither amusing nor amateurish, My Lord Peverell, Lord Potter, and Heir Ascendant Black, cousin by alliance to my House of Malfoy. In truth of fact, all the methods that you stated were used by several parties at some point in history. Firstly, the power sink where sit the mythalar pillars was not fully airtight or watertight as the liquid Primal Essaence had to flow and circulate around the stonework plumbing to irrigate the mithril lances which were the active emitters of the ward scheme. This meant that when the wards were commanded by the keystone hidden in the war-room atop the Turris Magnus, in the small lantern above the headmaster's office and quarters, they could make the hyper-dense fluid recede to the sink. Once the pipes were dry, they could crawl through the ducts to access the hidden foundations. This was done by physically scratching off the runes and figures on several of the crystal segments that compose the keystone to change the program into new configurations. The original coding had been optimized for the Ley Line junction and an epoch of great warfare, but several wanted to reduce the wards down to a 'peace' or 'civilian' setting, that permitted more active modifications to the castle structure, resident populace or allowed visitors. As such, when the masonry ducts were breached, all the other methods slowly became feasible, as they sent an elf to crawl through the pipes with a portkey beacon that allowed the wizards to then go down directly to the power sink's floor, and eventually gaze upon the Mana Source itself. But, it was done over centuries, by dozens of inept or felonious cretins, none of whom knew what damages they wrought upon the school and grounds."

Madam Bones interfered in the explanation by asking "And that is the reason they want to bisect the castle across the ankles, and lift it in the air by four full floors? Because the original structure was never meant to be accessed or modified unless the castle was sacked and demolished in war by the enemy forces?"

Nodding in genuine sadness, Lord Malfoy confirmed the simple facts. "The architecture of the day was grandiose when they crafted stone and wood, but their abilities with utilities like plumbing and drainage devices made of metals or crystals was quite primitive. Everything relied solely on gravity, evaporation or the tidal action of the Black Lake to flush and remove the offal from the cesspits sunken in the base of Hogwarts, just above the sealed layers. These were no doubts masterful creations of genius for their day, but we have evolved beyond these methods. It would be far less costly, and much quicker, to build a new system that will not need to bisect the castle for levitation, just surgically boring through a few floors and walls to pass the requisite crystal piping to connect the existing devices. And while I am proud of being a High Traditionalist of the Darkes, even our philosophy understands that life brings changes and adaptations to us all. The new construction is what the Board favors for solution. Thank you."

Madam Marchbanks pounded lightly the gavel-wand of Magistrature upon the small wooden wooden block shaped like the first Wizengamot Grimoire to sound-off her demand for attention as further points were forthcoming. "Alright, ye scurrilous bunch o' daft males! There are two Board members who have voted against the report their committee has just deposed before us, and they have come with their own solicitors and scribes to make presentation of their arguments to the Gamot in this emergency session. Lord Prudent Myzere, Head of House Myzere, you have the floor open for your dissenting presentation."

Standing up slowly, the elderly wizard used a long mahogany cane capped by a dog-head pommel to stay upright on his feet, at visibly great efforts. Skin pale and sallow, with a sheen of sweat over his brow that would soon drip into his barely focused eyes, the ancient Warlock tried to speak clearly despite a slight stutter every twenty words or so. "Ladies, Warlocks and Proxies of the British Wizengamot, thank you for allowing the presentation of our minority brief. While I have served the Hogwarts Board for nigh on eight decades as my father and grand-father before me, the House of Myzere can no longer remain silent at what has caused this debacle, and the cascade of threats to our society that has been unleashed in result."

Sitting back at his chair at the Board's table, he was right next to Dolores Umbridge who was in the very first chair of the private solicitors' table on that side of the Governors. The frog-like smirk on the witch's face set many at ill-ease, and her overall bactracian mien did nothing to set minds or magicks at peace in the room.

Lord Myzere pursued in his slow pace; "Albus Dumbledore was a criminal and a tyrant with little morality of humanity, but then again he was a half-blood from a poor, peasant family whose name had not been valued for centuries before his elevation. He was defrauded by a half-blood witch who had made a career out of conspuating and degrading the most sacred of our esoteric arts, Talents and Gifts as if it were muggle Burlesque for skit on the stage! All of these depraved seditions and treasons of Britain can be squarely laid at the feet of half-bloods, mudbloods and muggle-lovers who repeatedly assail our culture, our institutions and the very magick in our bodies and souls, to steal it from us! I think that the solution is as simple as it will no doubt set the bleeding-heart lefties of this chamber a-twitter with great ejaculations of bombast."

Taking a steadying breath, Lord Myzere gestured magnanimously to Dolores Umbridge as he presented her to the Warlocks. "Our minority of the Hogwarts Governors have retained the gracious professional services of Madam Dolores Jane Umbridge, esquire, Heiress Presumptive of House Selwyn, certified notary, licensed solicitor and barrister of the Gamot. She has used her lengthy work experience inside the halls of the Ministry of Magic to assist us in our august task of righting the immoral wrongs, repairing the cultural damages, and safeguarding our bodies and souls from further encroachment by these foreign, non-wizardly menaces. Dolores, please."

Umbridge stood up from her subaltern chair to make her lengthy, vapid, self-serving speech about repelling half-bloods, mudbloods and muggle-influenced fools out of their halls of power and schools, while purging by wand-fire the creatures and monsters like Goblins and Centaurs,who pretended to have the same value as humans. She was fully enraptured in her two seconds of glory inside her own mind's eye, only to crash to reality in excruciating pain and emotional distress when that hated voice of the BOY resounded across the debate hall.

"Point of Order, madam Chief-Witch! The Houses of Peverell, Potter and Black challenge the rights of presentation and debate of this being inside these august walls!" Harry Potter shouted to be heard over the din of disapproval that had already begun just as Lord Myzere was finishing his reasons for holding a minority presentation against the Board's general consensus.

Gaveling her bock most vigorously, Madam Marchbanks ordered the chamber to decorum and peace, unless they wanted to evacuate and reconvene another day. "By entitled rights of the Most Venerable and Greatly Spiritual Houses of the Britannic Realms, Colonies and Commonwealth, you have the floor in priority, Lord Peverell and Potter. Depose your point of order."

Standing from his ancestral chair, Harry Potter whelmed all five feet of his height to appear as impressive as any Warlock seated in the room. His black robes with purple highlights and details were sumptuous, and his purple gloves thin and supple, showing his dexterity and contrasting with his many sigil rings of title, rank and style. The suddenly visible presence of Rehz Ib Fettach upon his left shoulder left many stunned as the senior scribe announced loudly the identity and lawful presence of the familiar bound by the High Traditions of The Old Ways.

"Madam Chief-Witch Marchbanks, my fellow Ladies, Warlocks and Proxies, honorable members of the Board of Governors, thank you for hearing my interruption to your debates, for I assure you it is of primordial importance." Pointing his be-ringed right index at Umbridge, the child accused firmly "I refuse to act like a Dumbledore potioned puppet any longer, or to claim Imperius when staying inert whilst depravities occur before my eyes! Not a week ago, this witch stood in chains inside this very chamber of parliament, accused of frauds, interference in DMLE investigations, attempted breach & seizure of hereditary Noble residence and heirlooms, attempt at censuring or destroying the Family Libraries of multiple Noble Houses, passing false orders to the aurors from an office holding no such authority or privileges, and attempted Line-Theft. She was fined a paltry 10,000 Galleons, sentenced to loss of three years of seniority and forbidden from holding any position of 'senior-level' authority, in either legislative, judicial or bureaucratic branches of our nation's government and institutions. Minister Fudge sacked her in fear for his own seat, not because he actually wanted to as he had tried to minimize her sentencing as much as the laws allowed him to. He most certainly showed neither decency nor good taste when he did so, in full view of this hallowed chamber. And now, today, we see why that decision was badly reflected and shouldn't have happened."

Harry leaned forward, putting both jeweled hands on the banister to grip it fiercely to keep from casting pain and mind-warping curses at the error of Nature that so aggrieved him yet again.

"Therefore; what is she doing inside this chamber during an emergency session, which is the very definition of senior-level authority and decision-making? And what is she doing attempting to influence the discussions about the future and management of Hogwarts, one of our national institutions, thusly usurping for herself a great swathe of authority and power over the lives of thousands of our citizens and foreign students? And why in the names of Hades, Gaia, Cosme and Mystra, is this rabid bitch allowed to pretend so scurrilously that she is the heiress of any house at all? And Selwyn? Really? She tried that very line in her trial a week back, and both the House Selwyn solicitors and Gringotts rebuffed her lies as yet another attempt at Line-Theft and Line-Graft! She should have been put in chains and carted off to Azkaban for that, and yet she's here, at it again! Why is this tolerated, madam Bones and Madam Marchbanks? My fellow Warlocks? Why must we suffer this obscene spectacle of horrors, hypocrisies and perjuries, without any protests? Answer me, you damned daft twits! Wake the fucks up and do something, ye knaves!"

Despite all her protestations, Dolores Umbridge was made to attest of her links to House Selwyn by Blood-Law, adoption or marriage and present the proofs she had for declaring herself Heiress of the House while the last known member in the direct line of heredity had just died a few weeks ago during the investigations inside Hogwarts. When asked if she had the Heritage Ritual documentation from Gringotts, the woman replied that she would never let those foul sub-human under-beings touch her Blood or Magick to steal and submit her soul to their fell arts. She was Selwyn because she said so, and her word as witch should suffice, unless they were half-bloods and blood-traitors like the Weasleys.

Smiling just as toothily as Rehz, Harry stunned the chamber by standing up and declaring loudly like a scandal once in a while was good clean fun; "Whelp, that helps things along! I'm a half-blood! My titled noble Pureblood father married my pauper muggle-born mother in lawful and magical matrimony before the Prelate at the Temple of the Moon, in Diagon Alley. Therefore, fulfilling your exacting criteria for investigative requests, I ask anew: where is the damned Heritage Ritual report? Where is the proof that Gringotts recognizes your claims to the Seat of Selwyn in this Hall and in Society? Depose your proofs or be sentenced for Line-Theft, ye scurvy cad!"

The explosive tizzy of outrage and invectives that followed was as noisy as the morning rising tides in the wharves, while the scribes were going insane at trying to make sure the dicta-quills didn't skip of miss any of the events unfolding in the august deliberation hall.

Madam Amelia Bones, Head of the DMLE and auror corps, was congratulating herself for having the instinct of setting her 'Monocle of Doom', gifted to her by her late husband Edgar when she attained the rank of Senior Auror, to its panoramic view & recording. That wide angled perspective would complement well the auto-pensiever that was linked to her psyche since birth, as was usually the case in the titled and noble houses that were not sworn to Dumbledore and his 'Light of Wizarding Britain' in the last six decades. It was now obvious WHY he had tried repeatedly to have the ancestral protection devices disconnected or even seized by DMLE, as the numerous Line-Thefts, murders and enslavement's proved. Only those who were properly linked to their Family's heirlooms or auto-pensiever could have resisted the mind-rapes and control potions of Dumbledore, if only because when their families or Gringotts accountants detected disparities, they would have looked at the memories stored safely in the vaults and seen the crimes immediately. It also explained WHY Albus always hit victims who were just entering Hogwarts; their personalities were in a period of flux that would be worsened by new friends or enemies, schoolwork stresses and the dreaded puberty changes. The parents and goblins never really paid attention to the attitude changes or fluctuations in kids that age, so the child-predator had a chattel of captive preys to chose from at his leisure. Well, Amelia was pretty sure that auto-pensievers would be quite the raging fashion in the coming months, and so would recording jewelry and eyewear like her beloved, and lethal, monocle.

Several of the 'Light' or 'Good' faction members had no idea what to think or believe anymore, with the massive, steady rock that had been Albus Dumbledore removed from their daily lives, and now one of the preeminent 'Light' Houses going full-on Traditional Darkes like the boy's parents had never oathed to Albus in the first place. While it was a clear truth that Umbridge was evil and perjurious, and an openly avowed specist bigot and blood-purist of the most fanatical sort, many in the left side of the Gamot's spectrum didn't know that they wanted to kick her out without an audience. Not if it meant giving this presumptuous child and his wildly different, unpredictable policies a venue without adversaries to forcibly make him spell out his goals. And, for some of the elderly members of the sectarian parliament, letting any younger arrival that was so clearly let in only on the force of his titles, ranks and styles, rather than their perfunctory confirmation vote, was an emotionally hurtful reality.

Many of Dumbledore's elderly contemporaries born in the 1800's still sat in the hall, holding on for dear life to their lordships and proxies far passed the capacity of their bodies or minds to tolerate the workload of sitting in deliberation or voting through protocols & procedures. This meant that even if Dolores Umbridge was painfully, visibly, an abhorrent creature who should be tried, sentenced and cast to Azkaban hence-with, many who were officially 'In the Light' were not clamoring for her interrogation, nor did they support Harry Potter's lawful point. In fact, many of the so-called 'Good' geriatric Warlocks would vote to repudiate the point of order if it was ever put to the question docket, although anything objected by a 'Most Venerable' or 'Greatly Spiritual' House would no doubt be declared 'Standing Gamot Protocol' and see the woman at the very least kicked out and fined for interfering in an emergency session. Whether she was arrested by the aurors or just made to formally prove her House affiliation was also up in the air, and the ancient magi knew full well that the times when they could have affected the outcome of such processes were far gone, like their health or mental accuity.

Therefore, it wasn't a very great surprise, even it if disappointed or disgruntled many, when Madam Marchbanks banged vigorously the Epic Small Mallet of Loving Corrections on the wooden Portable Epitome of Serene Sagesse with a gusto that exuded lustful desire for a good, hard fight on the chamber floor. Who knew the decrepit biddy still had it in her, at the ripe old age of 169? She had been lead-proctor at Dumbledore's OWL's and NEWT's, and worked in education all of her adult life. Maybe she wanted a bit of excitement before retiring back in her native rural village?

Bang! Bang! And BANG! The wooden artifact noisily struck the other wooden artifact, creating a shower of magical sparks and faerie fires that splashed all around the debate hall, surprising most out of their torrid word-wars with their neighbors. A few had to be injuncted directly by the Chief-Witch, who did the task with visible glee and joy as she made the mallet activate, creating a five foot long warhammer that weighed like a quill feather but hit like a dozen angry vikings.

"Now hear ye this, ya lots of mangy curs and bitches! I said TO ORDER THE ROOM! Not ignore me cuz I'm a wrinkled, useless old mule!" Marchbanks' rural accent was coming back with alacrity as she cast aspersions and vitriol on the family lines and parentages of the few hard-headed fools who hadn't sat back at peace yet. Squinting her eyes and her lips pursed like a miser's coin bag in front of a niffler, she mentally trigered another function in the mallet as she administered an 'epic loving correction' to the skinny backside of a geriatric warlock with a giant-sized ghostly hand that smacked the obstinate man spectacularly and resoundingly, right off his feet and face-first into the hard wooden pews in front of him.

A wave of nervous, tittering laughter coursed through the hall as many let out the overload of stress and anxiety, all the while hoping that Griselda would reign in her Irish temper before things got really handsy between them. As he got to his feet and then his chair, the old crone was heard to complain "Damn it, woman! I know it's been a while we got together for a tryst, but you could give a poor bloke gentler hints! My bones are fragile at my age!" he whined like a spoiled brat, making many think the Chief-Witch had probably used the only method the old wizard could understand or follow in reasonable delays. This of course set off another bout of nervous laughter by the assembly as his neighboring Warlock on the right used a few Episkey's to heal his bruises from getting knocked about. The helpful old gentleman had troubles keeping his wand straight as he was bubbling with bombastic humor spasms at his friend's predicament too.

Madam Marchbanks took advantage of the pseudo-pause to declare in a darkly menacing tone of voice as she caressed the wooden mallet "Dannonvale! You mannerless cad! See me in my office after Gamot is out! You obviously need a reminder of manners and decorum. Since your poor late parents can't attend you, I will! Now sit, while you still can!" She aimed a powerfully charged glare at the old wizard who crumbled in his chair, pink in the face from embarrassment as the audience howled with liberating laughter again.

"Now, now! Peace and decorum in this Gamot or ya'll be evacuated! We have ourselves a point of order on the docket, and since the person intimated by said point has indeed a proven and adjudicated history of perjuries, falsifications, abuse of & hijacking of authority, trying to pass herself off as law enforcement, and just skated-by on Attempted Line-Theft, I find that there is indeed enough matter to be asking her for genuine, material proofs in the convened manners. Madam Dolores Jane Umbridge, esquire, where are the Heritage Blood-Tithe Ritual reports from Gringotts' Wizarding Bank, or any other magical bank, or chartered conclave or Living God church? You have many options under the Law of the Land to prove your claims without any injurious burdens or demeanment to your person and magicks. So, then? Them parchments?"

Seeing as Umbridge had not gone to Gringotts or anywhere else to get blood-tested for House affiliations, the senior scribe used the Gamot's self-updating registers to find her date of birth and schooling records, but disregarded her Ministry employment file as it was proved and adjudicated she had forged and falsified many details in it. Finding his quarry, he exclaimed aloud "I have it, Madam Chief-Witch! Yon Dolores Jane Umbridge, pure user of one Realm in the wizardly arts, styled 'witch' in the Welsh Wiccan traditions. Her parents were a low-bred blue collar Pureblood from an untitled Family and the fourth daughter of the then already deceased Lord Merrymack Elvar Selwyn. The Lord of House at her birth never accepted her into the main Family, nor the extended House. Nor have any of his successors since. She may have a small parcel of Selwyn biology in her, but magically and legally, she counts as a half-blood by the way the legal and cultural definitions are written. Also, the last person to hold the title of Lord Selwyn, however briefly, was the poor late junior auror Malice Irene Selwyn, Lady-Elect, who hadn't even had the time to go pass the full rituals when she got killed at Hogwarts by the specter possessing Professor Quirrell. In her preliminary documentation filed with both Gringotts and the Ministry clerks, she had formally written her desire to enact terminal disownment by magic of all the dead or illegitimate branches of the Family and House. Dolores Umbridge's name is in the list of people to be formally removed from the Selwyn Blood-Law and grimoire."

The order came from Madam Bones faster than Madam Marchbanks could pound her gavel for order; "Aurors! Seize the Line-Thief! Search her person and effects, now! Put suppression cuffs on her and drag her to the interrogation cells in DMLE, now! And why we're at it, get me her wand and any other focus you find. I want to cast some Priori Incantato charms on those before she leaves the room. I want to make sure she didn't pull a Dumbledore on us already."

The Gamot members were in a frothing rage as the results from the divinations on her primary wand, second wand hidden in her sleeve, and two kitten shaped amulets in her hair. She had anchored Imperius curses to the cat fetishes, and the magical threads linked to the auror at the door that had tried to block Harry from entering until he was threatened with a public report, and the junior scribe who had tried to refuse Harry's right to sit in council with the Warlocks due to his age and not having the summons parchment in hand. It was soon proven that the young man had been ordered by Umbridge to destroy Harry's summons and erase his name from the register of active members as if the titles and lordships of Peverell and Potter had never been attributed.  
The wand hidden in her right sleeve was emitting a low-powered compulsion towards Lord Myzere to make him think it was his idea to hire Dolores as private notary and barrister to present his dissenting memorandum to the Gamot assembly. He had done the 'research' and redaction all by himself and planned to present it alone when Umbridge told him that at least one other member of the Board agreed with his findings, but had not known how to present them in such an articulated and credible manner. It averred the second Board Member was being coerced by Umbridge through blackmail about his homosexual trysts with several minor-aged boys whom he had drugged or spelled during his employ as live-in private tutor. His position as Head of the Private Tutors' guild of Wizarding Britain was immediately terminated, as were his teaching permit and private tutoring license, then he was carted off to the cells with Umbridge.

The brouhaha in the Gamot after that was truly memorable, to the point that even the innumerable camera flashes from the press gallery didn't diminish the dint or quell the querulous displays of the seated Ladies, Lords and Proxies. Out of options, and well passed dinner anyways, Madam Marchbanks struck the Epic Mallet so forcibly on the wooden booklet that it flew off the bench, across the chamber floor, to 'gift' it's Sagesse unto a witch getting into fisticuffs with a younger Warlock. The resplendently noisesome impact of the effigial book was heard over everything as it struck hard enough to make the poor witch spin around a virtual axis located at waist-height like a hotel's revolving door, only to land face-first into the wooden benches with her arse up in the air and her skirts and robes draping all around her inverted torso and arms. She stayed there, legs splayed like a wilting flower, while everybody got a good look at the hot pink with yellow dots muggle spandex yoga shorts she wore under her Wiccan wardrobe.

The highly emotional "Ahrgh! Me poor eyes! They burn! Make it stop!" from old Lord Ogden got the whole room into yet another row that Griselda was wise enough to let loose steam on its own, this time. Maybe the aurors could handle the evacuation on their own after all.

Summer vacations 1991

(Harry Potter - theme)

July 1991  
Multiple locations  
The British Isles & Europa

Harry Potter was smiling as he contemplated the drab grey concrete buildings of the Vice-Archiduke Ulyrance Van Uttebatten - GCVO public elementary academy for what should be the last time of his life. He had finished writing the mandatory governmental tests for 5th year students and done as good as he possibly could, given that he needn't hide his mind and skills anymore. Well, not on the muggle side anyways. Until he moved around Hogwarts itself, he had no real idea of just what kind of environment it would be, or what decisions he would be obliged to make and live with.

One of the downsides of finishing primary was that he no longer had the right to attend their summer camps, not that it did much change in his schedule. Because of the officially recognized lordships and heirships, he had to meet tutors at Gringotts several days per week to receive concentrated classes on estate management, general business, contract laws, church & religious laws, politics, international diplomacy, travel & border laws, nobility civics and High Traditional etiquette. This led to a charged calendar, with a few necessary pauses set throughout the two months before high school began.

{ HP } --- { Liquid folly & tears } --- { HP }

"You aren't nearly as funny as you think, old man!" poor and much maligned Harry Potter griped at his oath-bound godfather through the enchanted mirror placed on the desk, in the Master's vault inside Lily's trunk. The device was a god-sent gift, yes, but right now he could do without such a piece of charms-craft if it allowed him to tune out his relative's barking canine laughter. The migraine he had wasn't getting any better, but he couldn't get drunk or take a healing draft because he had a language potion to drink tonight, as he always did for summer vacations. It wasn't because the plebes got lazy under the sun that he had to follow suit, especially when studying and self-improvement was as easy as quaffing a draught when he lay down for the night.

This year it was Orushkeh-Tegh, the language common to all Kobolds, Goblinoids, Orcoids, Ogrin and Troll-kin, for the month of July. He would finally be able to interact politely with his account managers to the point where they weren't afraid to see him face-to-face inside Gringotts when doing regular business. August would see him partake of the Cyrillic Alphabet and the tongues deriving from ancient Greek onwards, so he could understand the Latin tongues and their derivatives even better than the potion from three years ago had given him.

Sirius kept on chuckling anyways, not any more inclined towards tact or maturity than when he was mates with James and their schooldays crowd. Sitting back in his lounge chair, the 31 year old male looked far too pleased with himself and the situation to not deserve being smacked upside the head like a moron. It was just too bad that Harry was stuck in Surrey while the ultra rich and stupidly dandyish Lord Black was in France, waiting for his trial date to cross into England at long last. The Potter Lord promised himself to learn more about mirroromancy to be able to send spells and psionics through the mirrorscape next time the man-child pissed him off.

"Well, look at it this way," Sirius quipped with a bullshitting smirk, "At least now people know you can play the game by the rules that were set in place, and make them work for you. The bad thing, however, means that they'll now see you as a real threat and try to neuter you, or take you off the field. Make it look like a rogue bludger, I'll wager, or a new spell gone bad."

Snorting in dark amusement, the 10 year old replied "Good luck with that, since I don't play any quidditch, and I never try to learn spells alone. I learned my lesson about over-casting or trying stuff above my level at an early age. Watching a brand new book burn because I thought I could cast a Blue-Bell Flame on it to keep my fingers warm while I read it wasn't the cleverest thing I ever did, but I learned no to try things on myself or stuff I need to stay alive."

Snorting in mirth at his godson's ancient history, the older male shook his head to fluff his long silky black hair, like a dog shaking itself. Gazing at Harry through the mirror, he said in a rather crude attempt at being sly; "You know, if you aren't interested in suffering through all this crap from the Wizengamot, Ministry and bureaucracy, you could just name a Steward for House Potter and let the hireling plow through the offal in your stead. Given how you're headed to Hogwarts in a month, that would be the wise thing to do. Especially since I'm pretty sure that the teachers will be a lot different than they were when I was there. Without potions and curses in them, they just might actually teach up to ICW standards, or better, and that'll take a lot of your time and effort to perform up to par." With a negligent gesture of his left hand that almost sloshed his rum & coke out of the goblet, he said in a disdainful tone that wasn't particularly subtle anymore "Let the grown-ups to their jobs, for a change. You should have from the start."

Harry suddenly became so rigidly stiff that even his magical aura seemed to freeze, giving Rehz a raw feel of the boy's nastier side. Making an incredible effort at staying calm and collected to not give the pseudo-adult bastard the satisfaction of seeing him out of control, Harry baited him in a sickly sweet tone. "Tell me then, dear lordly uncle of mine, who could possibly be educated, reliable and trustworthy enough to handle all of my convoluted affairs? I don't know that many people, and most of them I wouldn't trust that much. Maybe with my health and keeping the doctors on a leash when I'm in the hospital for surgery, but not with my Families." the child told in a nonchalant manner as he buttered his bread roll with short, swift strokes of the knife.

Sirius Black wasn't subtle by nature, and that also extended to his limited capacity for picking up on micro-expressions and higher, snobbier linguistics. Even the part of his dog animagus' senses that transferred to his human form didn't help him to read people better, especially when he let his deluded hubris and self-importance run-off with his common sense. It was the biggest reason he had gone for hit-wizard training rather than auror or DMLE inspector; he had never really gotten past the flash-bang type of magicks, or reasoning. That was also the main reason why he didn't pick up on the physical and verbal cues that were coming off his godson pretty clearly.

"Well, your old, mature, uncle Remus is available. He's always available, as it is." The older man replied in tart attitude, after a long pull of his cheap, low-class boozy drink.

Sirius didn't like sobriety when he was younger, and liked it less after his short stint in Azkaban, under Dumbledore's betrayals. Now that he was rich, independent and above the common plebes' usual petty concerns, he had no intention of being sober if he could avoid it. And since he could pay some goblin and human hirelings to handle everything for him, Sirius felt no qualms about slowly burning off the Black fortune on muggle casinos, whores, drugs and booze during a permanent vacation, slumming across Europa and Slavia. He was high enough in the pecking order of politics and economics that he didn't have to give a wank about whatever opinions the nay-sayers and do-gooders had about his habits.

"Well that's funny," replied Harry in a studiously neutral tone between bites of his dinner, "I don't recall having any uncle named Remus in the Blood-Law of either Houses that I belong to, so you'll have to be more descriptive. A color photo would help, like his passport or driver's license. Just to be sure. Who knows? Maybe Dumbledore obliviated him out of my head, like he did with dozens of things since I was born." he declared in a bored tone that his uncle wasn't able to read through due to being already passed half-drunk despite the early hour.

Sirius grumbled nasty stuff about Dumbledore, then elaborated in slow, careful phrases as he needed to pay more attention to the conversation than he really wanted to anymore. Man, was this kid a burden to carry! James was never this intense, and never all the time like that. Even that poser bint Lily had finally gotten slacker passed fourth year. Sirius really hoped the boy wouldn't end up as uptight and high-strung as his mother had been in the beginning. Having a few muddies every five generations to refresh the family tree might be wise, but man were halfers and their kids hard on his nerves! The sooner the little bastard was shipped off to Hoggy Hoggy old Hogwarts to be kept in line and silent 10 months a year, the better off Sirius' life would be. He was only doing as much as he did because of James' memory, not because he cared that much after ten years of not seeing the kid or having any relations with him.

"Well, he's the third guy amongst us Marauders, the team of boys that was the Guardian Light of Hogwarts, against them damned Slytherin bastards. SLURP! All Death Eaters in training, the lot of them slimy snakes were. Not a single one that ever ended well. Not a one! Just look at that tosser Snivellius Snape! If ever there was a stereotype for greasy haired loser of a back-alley vagrant, it was him they based it on! SLURP!" Sirius expounded quite strongly, despite noisily guzzling his alcoholic beverage as if the bar would close before he could order another. "But we gave as good, and better!, than those poison spitting vipers ever did! We Marauded them off to Timbuktu and they stayed there! Ah ah ah! SLURP!"

Laying back in his lounger, Sirius dropped the empty goblet on the side-table, folding his hands on his belly to make his case for Remus Lupin being hired. Not that he thought he had that much of a case to do, anyways. HE was the adult, so the kid would obey him, just like he would have obeyed James, Charlus or Fleamont. Period.

In that reasoning, Sirius Orion Black III made the same stupid mistake as Albus Dumbledore and Dolores Umbridge had done before him. It would end just as well, too.

"Remus John Lupin was prefect for three years, in the top 3% of his year each year, and never lower than the top 5% grade stratum in his entire schooling. And that was despite all the numerous detentions we got because of all the pranks, Marauding and fun stuff we did. He got himself four masteries since he graduated, and all at ICW standards, too. Lemme think, they were: history of the magical world; history of the muggle world; duel, combat & defense for professionals; then finally teaching kids & tutoring professionals."

Then, slurring in a disdainful tone, Sirius added in a tipsy way "The guy is the worst bookworm ever, but he has a good head on him. If I remember right, He's finishing another mastery part-time. In bloody magical artistry & restauration of enchanted antiques, no less! And he's doing it just for fun! Well, he also said it would combine with his combat diploma to earn him a curse-breaker license so he could take freelance contracts from Gringotts, at some point. Maybe. I don't really remember what he said all that well. He talks a lot, anyways. He's like you, in fact. Or more you're like him, cuz he's older and came before you, otherwise you'd be the Marauder instead of him. But you both talk too damned much for anybody with taste's common sense. Damn but he's such a fucking nerd, that guy! No wonder he's still single after all this time spent sucking-off books instead of cunts!"

Harry set aside his empty potage bowl to concentrate on his main dish while the 'Unseen Servant' dweomer cleared away the soiled dishes. Rehz sat on the table on a ventral couch that Harry had custom-built for him to be able to eat at the same level as him and any guests they had. He had eaten his meals with Dryskholl as equals, and had no intention of doing differently with his familiar, especially given how sociable and intelligent he was. And right now, Harry thought he'd rather go talk about Nightsoil's alchemical properties with the Tenebrous Pioneer than sit here and be insulted to his face, the way this conversation was turning.

Harry asked snidely "If he was so damned good at helping out kids and teaching any age group, why wasn't he helping ME, his erstwhile nephew, in those ten damned years? More specifically, why was I living in the basement of my damned primary school, if I had an honorary uncle that was so competent he has multiple masteries at ICW standings? I would like to know that, first."

Sirius shrugged it off indolently as he signaled the fearful house-elf for another rum & coke from his position of debauched laziness. He was in a private VMW room in a wizarding 5-star resort in Calais, on the shores of The Channel, facing Dover in Britain. He could have seen the ferries crossing if he bothered to sit up to look over the balcony banister, but that would have demanded that he be paying attention to the world, and he didn't want to. He wanted to be buzzed-out again. He told the elf to flush the drink and just bring a new, full bottle of rum so he could drink straight out of it. The dreams about the Dementors and abandoning James to die had haunted him fiercely again last night, and he needed this conversation to be over so he could get back to drinking and forgetting.

Sighing loudly like a spoiled brat who was told to clean his room for the hundredth time, Sirius shrugged absently as he took the bottle and slurped from it like a wild dog. After chugging several ounces, he deigned to answer the impudent, indocile child. "Well, that was all old Albus Dumbledore's fault, just like a lot of things, back in those days. First he set the blood-wards around your aunt's house to repel any wizards that weren't himself or you. Then he added dark-repulsion against lycans to the set. So that meant that Remus would have had to meet you over a klick away from home to do anything. If he had ever gotten the bearded old goat's permission. In fact, Albus could have given him an amulet to go through the wards, if had wanted to permit him access. But as you can guess, he just didn't want anybody to get to you. Not me, not Remus, not anybody. So then, a few years back, he let some minging bint called Umbridge get hired in the Ministry where she pushed anti-creature laws, especially weres. So Remus had to leave merry old England about six years ago. Not just to find a job, but to survive since the bitch tried to have all lycans declared on par with grindylows or ettercaps; wild dark creature that must be exterminated when they are close to wizarding dwellings or businesses. So he left England, and took jobs here or there. When I got out of Jail and England, I was in a bad shape for a couple of years, getting weaned off Dumbledore's potions, and he joined me to help my recovery."

Harry nodded minutely at the information Sirius told him, as it fit with what his account team at Gringotts had dug up about both men. In fact, while Sirius was getting drunker than a barrel of ale, Remus was probably in the hotel's library or upper salon, reading some of the rarer books that his normal socioeconomic status would prevent him from accessing. Sirius was blasting the Black's hereditary fortune not just on frivolities or follies, but on wasteful bummery of the basest kind. And his supposed friend had decided to just let him busy himself at his vices whilst he took advantage of the tenuous emotional link to suck-off funds, status, access and a lifestyle while the money was still flowing good. And Sirius wanted him to feed his parasite now, but why? Harry had doubts, but he wanted proof before deciding his reaction.

Ignoring the mannerless slurping of yet more rum, Harry asked carefully "And what could he possibly do for me that I can't do myself? I have sat in assembly and voted in the Wizengamot as a titled Lord and Warlock of the Britannic Realms, colonies and Commonwealth, so I fail to see what he could do in my stead so much better than me." And there he was; that bait should be obvious enough that the slovenly drunkard would see it and react.

And indeed, Sirius didn't wait to react.

With an obviously affected frown that was more childish moue than adult disagreement, Sirius tried to use a louder, more frightening voice to cow the child to his lordly adult whims. "Well, it's a good thing that I've been a bloody lord for longer than you, then! I can tell you what Remus can do better than you, but I'll do better than that! I'll tell him directly what to do, and you'll just shut the fuck up and listen, like kids are supposed to do when adults speak! You were brought up wild by muggle animals when even magical savages in the African Savannah would have done better, so I can't really blame you. But now, now you know about your heritage! The Potter 'Blood Compact' has activated, so you have no excuses anymore! You'll do what I say and name Remus as Potter steward willingly or I'll use my magical authority as godfather to make him the Regent over you until you're 27, and then keep it that way until you're 39 years old!"

Sirius shook his entire body in a way that could be like a wet dog, or a sickness shiver from having drunk too much alcohol in the last decade. There was no way to know, but his voice and demeanor were still easy to read clearly; he was in a strop and not hiding it. "See if I don't do it, you little cunt-dropping! Your uppity mudblood of a mother always thought she was better and higher than everybody else, and you sure take after her! Well, I won't stand for it! Wizards take after their fathers like real men! Only girls and sissies and defectives take after women in this world! You'll honor my will as if I were James, cuz you sure ain't him! You'll never be him! My mate James wan'nt no damn bookworm or sissy mama's boy! He was a man! A real wizard! I saw him in quidditch robes and in the locker showers after matches! I can swear on my magicks and life that he was more of a man than you'll ever be, you worthless little turdcake!"

Closing his eyes in misery at the new rejection, with his heart clenching at what he knew he must do to insure his survival and freedom from this drunken, violently destructive mongrel, Harry took the one step that would immediately set him free of all binds or attachments, at the cost of any relationship with the man or his allies. It was what Sirius would have called "A slimy snake, dark wizard, Slytherin move" but it would do the job enough to count right away.

Laying his palms flat on each side of his magically warmed plate to keep them from shaking in fear and raw, seething rage at having yet another drunken, aggressive traitor as uncle, Harry made the poisonous suggestion in a softly challenging voice.

"Do it then," he baited clearly, "Do it where I can see it. Claim on your magicks and your life that James Charleson Potter was a better wizard and man than I'll ever be in this life or the next." Harry spelled out his terms at length, adding as many caveats as he could, but also to make it seem like an emotional child wanting to be vindicated about his parent's love and his own worth, to entrap the intoxicated fool into his own delusion of an epoch he would never live again. "If you do that oath and still have your magicks intact inside you, I'll make Remus the Regent of all my Houses and titles right there in front of you. I have a second mirror for priority calls with Gringotts or the Wizengamot Services, so you'll be able to hear everything in person. No funny business."

Nodding violently like a demented bobble-head doll stuck in a tempest, the drunken, mentally ill man fumbled his wand out of its holster and, looking at the child suspiciously through the magic mirror, decided all on his own to make the oath even more binding, just to make the filthy little mudblood's halfer procreate know once and for all his place in life, Magyck and society. Cutting his left palm open to the bones with a quick -unsanctified- cantrip, the deluded male put the tip of his wand into the injury, thus making it a Blood-Oath upon his Identity and Blood-Law, as when he had made the godfather's oath all those years ago.

"I Sirius Orion Black III, Head of House, the reigning Lord of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, regent Duke of the Zezetshire Cairnhills, Peer of the Realms Britannic, do so solemnly swear upon my Blood, Magicks and Life that my mate, my one true friend and chum, James Charleson Potter, reigning Lord of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Potter, was and forever will be more of a wizard and man than this filthy little cum-stain of a boy who is not the son or wizard that he deserved to have, and sacrificed is life for. In Mystra Mother of all Magycks do I attest, so mote it be!"

Sirius never realized the full depths of what errors, or evils, he had done.

Firstly, he had done a blood-oath in direct contrary to an already established blood-oath, so he was now Oath-Breaker.

Secondly, he had reneged on his sacred duties as oath-bound godfather to protect and cherish the young child he was attached to, turning instead against him with intentions of violence and domination, no matter that it was the alcohol stripping away his filters and manners. In that moment of drunkenness he had spoken the truth hidden in the depths of his heart; Harry was not James and would never replace him.

Thirdly, the dog-like loyalty and pack mentality that Sirius suffered from was because he used to stay as a dog for several days at a time in Azkaban to survive the dementors with a modicum of sanity and health. Unfortunately, Sirius had never been very good at mind-magicks or occlumancy as Dumbledore had potioned and spelled him to destroy those innate Talents he may have had. That meant that when Sirius transformed, he became a slight bit less human and stayed a bit more dog at each switch.

Sirius was thusly imprinted upon James so strongly that he was essentially the other man's bitch, for lack of a more human or civilized phrase. This also meant that Sirius would never look at any other wizard or male of any species with respect or consideration, as his hard-wired canine mind would see this as betraying the pack leader and symbolically emasculating his best friend's memory.

Fourthly there was all the sexist, racist and blood-purist bigotry that had finally revealed itself from where Sirius usually kept it hidden from public scrutiny. He may have acted all chummy with Lily Evans in public, but in private he had always thought that James deserved better than a mudblood, especially given how close her, Snape and several snakes had been in the two first years at Hogwarts. If the stupid muggle-born didn't realize that these murderous bastards wanted her dead like Hitler killed jews, then she didn't deserve to live, to have magic inside her, and she certainly didn't deserve his best mate's true love. So, given a chance to speak in private that was fueled by more alcohol than his empty stomach and sickly dispositions could accept, he let out all that he really believed about the Order of Things in Nature, Magic and Society.

He broke his godfather's blood-oath.

He betrayed a sworn House-ally.

He betrayed the memory of his best mate.

He betrayed the trust of three houses together in one fell act.

He demonstrated to Nature and Magic that he was unworthy to be the child's godfather.

And Mystra, Mother of Magyck, judged him for his sins, regardless of alcohol or depression.

Sirius Orion Black III felt his magicks ebb out of his sickly, drunken body, his mind fighting against the sudden torpor that was invading it, showing him the lip of a yawning black Void that was absolute nothingness as far as magically boosted senses could perceive. He felt his core collapse on itself in his torso, then implode in his mind and soul, leaving him with the same feeling as when he wore magic-suppression cuffs to travel from the Ministry cells to Azkaban, or on the way back for his sham trial by the Unspeakables. Then he felt his eyes droop half closed, the sights losing color like when he transformed into a Grim, his animagus shape. Except this time, the vision wasn't sharp but blurry, and he didn't smell more or better, and his hearing seemed to be gone to the dogs too.

Eh eh eh! He made a funny, there. Gone to the dogs...

Sirius Orion Black III, the late Lord of House Black, was found dead in his lounge chair with a plethora of empty boozy drinks goblets in hand's reach on the side-table. The aurors had been called by the distraught house-elf who had wanted to call the hotel's medi-wizard but the young man had died too quickly for anybody to do anything to prevent the mess. The two first aurors on the scene had found the high quality Gringotts comms mirror on the table near the corpse and confirmed with the elf that the deceased had been speaking of Family Business with his godson in England for almost an hour, since dinner had started. They were each eating at the same time, or at least the 10 year old boy was, while his wastrel bum of an uncle got drunk faster than usual.

The French magical Gendarmerie Baguettière's medical examiner performed a local analysis and very quickly concluded to a blood-oath gone wrong, with an Oath-Breaking backlash occurring in the same instant, or near enough to not make a difference. The formal autopsy and divinations would tell, but it wouldn't matter. By the absolute lack of any residual magicks in the cadaver, the man had been mugglified, not squibbed, but fully mugglified by the consequences of whatever he had done to himself. There were no signs of presence other than the hotel's house-elf, and its testimony was offered freely, even to the point of accepting a field-dose of a light truth serum, as a preliminary. When they searched the body before transport to the morgue, they found that his wand had burned from the inside so badly that it was essentially fossilized by heat, and his Lord's sigil ring was gone, leaving a gray-purple burn mark similar to bad frostbite on his finger. The mark of a Family heirloom judging the bearer unworthy and leaving to find a better, more worthy Heir to hold the reigning title of the House.

Tentatively, the French aurors wrote the case as a "suspected defilement of self, magicks, Family and House so bad that the Blood-Law and heirlooms had judged the deceased and punished him to the depths of his crimes, sins, seditions and treasons, as per the Decree of Mystra." It would not take much time for the news to hit the magical governments and institutions of the planet, and then Gringotts confirmed what had been suspected all along.

Harry Jamieson Potter, Lord of Peverell and Potter, was now the Lord Black-elect, and only had to reach the bank to perform the Heritage Blood-Tithe Ritual for it to be official. Less than three hours after Sirius Black had been dissected and divined by the French pathologist, and the cause of death confirmed, young Harold Potter became the reigning Lord of a third titled noble House.

In Mystra nomine sancti, id mote est.

{ HP } --- { Work is the best cure for wrecked vacations } --- { HP }

Harry spent the best part of the next week with his nose buried in new books that he had found in several small bookshops, kiosks or chapels around the British Realms. Thanks to his Tenebrous Pioneer employee, he was able to gate to a location when he wanted, then use a Hadean prayer to contact the Pioneer to open the way back home, straight into the trunk. This allowed the child to finally put some attention into the new level of studies as an acolyte of Hades that he had been granted last All Hallow's Eve by his divinity. Plus, he now had the Black 'Blood Compact' active inside his mind, integrating itself slowly into the crowded space of his intellect and memories.

Harry had been able to get his hands on a generic teaching bible that was normally employed in formal novitiate and acolyte training in monasteries. It may be a bit old, as in four centuries back, but it was in good repair, and written in perfectly legible Welsh, which he spoke and read fluently thanks to his mother's excellent potions. The large book was two feet tall by a foot wide and about a foot thick. It was what experts considered an 'altar bible' because it wasn't meant to be moved out of the temple's protected areas. It was heavily illuminated with lettrines, floral motifs and celestials creatures on each page, sometimes as visual aid, and sometimes just for the beauty of the craftsmanship. The actual Welsh text was hand-made penmanship as almost nobody could produce anymore. It truly was well worth the 35 Galleons he had paid the used books seller for this treasure.

This bible held the basic spells lists for the generic training of any priest or cleric of any church that was either 'good' or 'Neutral' aligned. For 'darkness' or 'evil' priests, a completely different bible was needed, and Harry was looking for it, to know his enemies and be prepared for them. The book held a lot of lore on the historic methods, functions and uses of priests in communities that depended on them for practically all leadership and succor. The spells lists that were part of the cleric bases were; Repulsions, Protections, Channels of Purity, Summons, Communal Ways, Life Mastery and Holy Champion. All these were in the Power Realm of Channeling and depended upon a God or Celestial to work. However, they were a lot easier to learn and practice than regular wizardry since the deity's influence tended to smooth out a lot of the problems.

Harry had also found an old Latin spell-book from the Renaissance era that had served to form the French Gendarmerie Baguettière before muskets and gunpowder became standard equipment, a practice that British Welsh Wiccan morons had always refused. The worn and damaged old book held the base lists for the Warrior-Mage training pattern, a half-brute and half-wizard mercenary who specialized in combat, warfare and general wild lands expeditions. The book had some interesting lore about how a merchant caravan works, how a corps of troops is managed and deployed in battle, how individual soldiers are trained and expected to behave for efficient strikes or long-haul traveling. The base spells lists were; Adventurous Dweomers, Warfaring Magicks, Battlestaff, Mind's Touch, Highriding and Elemental Ways. Once repaired by being tilled in Nightsoil by the Tenebrous Pioneer, the book proved to be a very well written and concise army manual for training magical troops at a steady rhythm, and making sure they had a well rounded education in both mundane and occult fighting methods.

While most of these sorceries would be far too damaging to use inside a building or formal duel ring, they did have a few things that were immediately usable, especially the Mind's Touch list. It would help Harry learn all the basics of organizing his mind, managing the flows of data and creating filters between the layers and zones to avoid being drowned in free-floating factum. It would also make him far more resistant to any mental intrusion while teaching him the basics of active empathy and telepathy so he could do his own mind-delving, when absolutely needed.

The second most useful would be Battlestaff, even though it meant he would have to undo his existing item to rebuild it with the dweomers embedded inside. The trade-off in functionality and defensive potential was well worth the mess and time that would be invested in the process. The staff would now be linked to his person as if it were another bonded familiar, and have a small amount of mobility because he would change the shape to add limbs to serve as legs and arms with humanoid extremities. Harry would also make a vaguely humanoid head underneath the bowl that held the flames, as the enchantments would make the staff able to move and pivot its joints and limbs almost like a normal humanoid. The funny thing was that while the device could extend its limbs to help Harry or Rehz, it would usually stay it its pure 'staff' form, indolently floating on invisible eddies of magick besides the boy. It would also now be able to serve as a sentry when he slept or concentrated on a priority project, like healing his injuries or brewing a potion. All in all, his Battlestaff upgrade was well worth the 11 Galleons he had paid for the old book at the flea market.

Because he still wasn't truly over what had happened with Sirius Black, Harry had used his prerogative as the Lord-Elect to have he reading of the testament pushed back to the first week-end of October. He told the goblins that he needed to get over all the changes that formal connection with Wizarding Britain had brought to his life, the pile of lordships, and what happened to Hogwarts on top of everything else. And now this. He needed time to process things emotionally and intellectually before the public will reading at the bank, and then meeting the rest of the Black relatives. Given the impression Sirius had given him, he wasn't expecting much from them, not anymore.

Hogwarts year I; 1991-92

(Harry Potter - theme)

1991-92  
Hogwarts  
Scottish Higlands

September 1 had finally arrived and it was time for Harry to make his way to King's Cross Station to embark the Hogwarts express to Scotland. While Harry could have just grabbed his trunk and passed the floo at the small country inn where he resided since the end of elementary school, it was deemed a rite of passage to ride the express. The obvious goal was to make contacts with new kids to establish whom were age and social peers, and start networking early to help along one's school career. Harry being already the reigning Lord of three titled noble Houses was well above and beyond such pedestrian necessities. He knew what his future career and jobs would be, he didn't need to network or get job placement advice, unlike others, especially those new-bloods that the Welsh Wiccan wizarding Ministry had tagged and brought in to help renew the bloodlines of their waning sectarian group.

Harry, well inured to the mundane side of England by now thanks to the summer camps, walked in the streets to King's Cross, entered the cavernous station with nary a doubt, and proceeded to find himself a small bistro to grab a sit-down breakfast while he did some people-watching to refresh his instincts and evaluations of muggle society. After an hour of easy to digest food, he strolled quietly to the mentioned pillars between quays 9 and 10, his magic senses guiding him easily to detect the muggle repelling wards and illusion that covered the portal as bricks. He passed through the portal without issue, entering into a zone of London that was a throwback to yesteryear, when steam trains, top hats, frock coats, crinoline skirts, parasols and private butlers were the staples of well bred, rich and educated persons of power in British society.

Sniffing the air that was heavy with wet water-based steam and coal ash from the mighty red engine standing in the only berth the quay served, Harry could distinguish the particular smell of magical fire, specifically a salamander's nest. Having practiced some basic summonings through August, the child was now aware of a few easy to control creatures that wizards and priests had used for centuries to boil water, fire kilns or smelt metals in crucibles. The humble lizards from the elemental plane of fire was about the size of a small adult human, not very aggressive as long as it was fed properly, and really enjoyed letting out flames. If you gave it plenty of food and stuff to incinerate, it would turn the blaze into a magical one that would impart special properties to whatever was reacting in the vessel over the pyre. Some wizards and alchemists kept salamanders as trained pets or even familiars for just that purpose.

So, the Express runs its boilers with a nest of salamanders. Cute. And a cheap way to keep the system's mobile manatites energized so that the bevvy of repulsion and non-detection wards don't give out along the way. Given the train was bright red and rather large, it wouldn't take the muggles long to see it and ask questions. The Statute of Secrecy wouldn't last long after that.

The train left at 11:00am but Harry had wanted to arrive at 9:30am to have his choice of position since the kitsch gold foil ticket didn't assign any fixed seating or cabin. So, he walked along the outside of the venerable train, from the caboose at the rear to the peacefully smoking engine at the front then came back towards a compartment he felt would be well situated, just three down from the locomotive. If ever he felt like having a conversation with the conductors, he wouldn't have long to walk, and he was right to the wagon's public restroom as well.

In his cabin, Harry set his floating Battlestaff in the corner near the window and Rehz Ib Fettach wasted no time in blinking from the trunk to the back of the seat, then climbed into the Spirit Flame torch atop the staff. The dark Faerie Drake enjoyed the energies and soothing massage of the ghostly flames against his scales and wings, and tended to curl up like a cat inside the sconce when he had nothing pressing to do. Harry cast a few charms at the seat immediately next to the window to insure a cushy, warm and bump-free ride so he could read or write at peace. He had registered for a remote muggle secondary course program by mail, and he may need to fill out a few forms or preliminary work sheets to help with his placement in the program's competency qualification ladder. They would then allow him a choice of classes and specific tutors that would be appropriate to his level of erudition and autonomy according to their standards. His ultimate goal was to do like his mother, have diplomas in both mundane and magical worlds so that he could be recognized and valued in both.

Being titled nobility or having a hereditary fortune to sit on were no longer the panacea that they had been, up to about fifty years ago. The passage of World War II with the advent of industrialization had changed people's view of wealth, and the emergence of computers with the Internet Age starting made the ancient notions of social classes and educational hardships obsolete. There were teenaged kids starting businesses in the garage or basement of their parents that earned more than their father, despite that the man was a VP or Director after 25 plus years of service in the same company. Truly, Harry had to get with the times or he would be left behind like the nicely decorative but ultimately useless trinkets in the museums. And his Houses had suffered setbacks, betrayals and crimes enough without having to suffer through a dumb lazy bum as Lord, on top of everything else.

{ HP } --- { Family found at long last } --- { HP }

The young inheritor of the storied Peverell, Potter and Black (pending) fortunes was sitting in peaceful quietude with a massive tome of ritual lore of the Hadean cult on a small wooden lectern that he had brought from the trunk along with his pastime. There was nobody who would willingly keep that 25 pound beast on their lap if they could avoid it. On the funny side, it did put a great deal of truth in the expression "The weight of knowledge" that the ancient monks were so fond of.

At 10:25am, somebody knocked on his cabin door politely, making him speak aloud softly the parseltongue counter to the locking charm & redirection ward he had cast on it. Only people who were kin or House-allies could see through the wards to find the door, or else they were disinterested in all the stupid "Boy-Who-Lived" crap set up by Dumbledore so they might be worth giving them a chance at direct contact before arriving at school.

The door opened to reveal the form of a young girl with flaming red hair tied in twin pigtails who was wearing ordinary Wiccan summer robes, but of a higher cut and material than usual. She had the crest of her House embroidered on the left breast of the robes, indicating that she was the Heiress Presumptive of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Bones. She was laterally third-degree cousin to Harry via his great-grand-mother, Euphemia Bones.

Standing up as was proper for a gentleman greeting a Lady for the first time, Harry bowed at the waist with both hands on his hips near the sheaths for his permanent weapons, a hatchet on the left and dagger on the right. He always kept a small cal.22 pistol in an undetectable sheath at the small of his back and another on the left ankle, with his set of lock-picks on the right ankle. He gave the young girl the chance to present herself then replied in kind, politely as he wanted to make a good impression on what happened to be one of the few biological relatives he had still alive in the world.

Susan Bones was a young, bubbly, excited girl, but not in a way that aggravated Harry or made him regret welcoming her in his cabin. They quickly set to speak of the recent events that had happened in the Welsh Wiccan community, and Magical Britannia at large. Just before entering a conversation about Hogwarts proper, there was a discrete knock at the door, which Harry again unlocked just long enough to admit the newcomer.

He was a young, slightly rounded boy with blond hair and watery blue eyes, whose white skin was actually tanned by long hours spent outside of buildings in open air. As he bowed and shook Harry's hand, he revealed that he also had the strong, calloused hands of a child who had begun to work in the fields and greenhouses for prolonged periods at an early age. Neville Franklin Longbottom, Heir of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Longbottom, had been supposed to be Harry's god-brother, until Albus Dumbledore tried to break their families to further his evil machinations. The young boy was shy, to the point of maladive timidity, but he warmed up quickly enough to the two other children, especially given how welcoming Harry was with both of them. Neville showed them his precious toad Trevor, with whom he had managed to establish Rapport. The amphibian wasn't his familiar yet, but it was a good first step for a child whose family had always believed he had been squibbed during the attack on his parents, a decade back.

It was near 10:42am that another knock disturbed the cabin, more imperious and assured than the two previous guests. When Harry slid the door open, he faced two very different persons, and yet there were similarities in their facial traits that spoke of close cousins. Letting them in, Harry learned that they were Draconnis Lucius Malfoy, Heir of the Ancient and Noble House of Malfoy, and Heir secondary of House Black via his mother, Narcissa Black Malfoy. The second person was a young woman entering her seventh year at school, Nymphadora Tonks, the sole daughter of Andromeda Black Tonks, disinherited from the Family Black, but not cast out by magic. It was glaringly obvious that Draco disdained Nymphadora for her mother getting kicked out (incompletely) of House, her muggle-born father, and their lesser financial status. The girl, however, didn't seem to put much stock in those things, replying snidely that money couldn't be eaten or cast out of a wand to keep you fed and warm, unlike magic, training and knowledge.

Harry put an end to the sibling-like nasty bickering before it got nastier, and more personal, than the initial posturing for status that seemed the usual method of Purebloods and Titled Nobles when engaging in social meetings with a crowd of witnesses. Since all four of his guests already knew each other from social events they had attended for Family affairs and read about their parents' businesses in the Daily Prophet often enough, Harry didn't have much to do in terms of official presentations.

Young Harry also established clearly that he had no intention to tolerate bigotry, racist and blood-purity nonsense in his presence. He knew for a proven fact that all these things were based only in ignorance, fear bred by ignorance, or rabid envy to dominate others like Dumbledore. The child Lord would tolerate no expression or action that would instate or legitimize such things, and would actively fight against them. They were all Family, and should bloody well act like it, especially in public like the train and school. With that mindset firmly settled, the five young persons were about to start talking about the changes committed to the school when a shy, tentative knock at the door interrupted them, just 5 minutes before the train rolled out.

Frowning, Harry stood to open the door politely, wondering if he had forgotten any relatives that should be visiting him on the trip. He was aware of only the four already inside, so who could it be? The panel slid aside to reveal a first year girl, crying hard, with a huge amount of curly, fritzed-out brown hair and several bruises showing through the tears in her thin summer muggle blouse. She was holding a damaged messenger bag in both arms and had a brand new student trunk by her side that was also damaged. Immediately putting on his Wizengamot face, Harry asked the young girl what had happened to her while helping her to sit on the last free chair, next to the door, besides Nymphadora. The older girl took the occasion to take out a shiny silver badge and pin it to her muggle leather jacket, to show she was a Hogwarts prefect this year.

The young girl was named Hermione Jean Granger, sole daughter of two career dentists, who were in fact world renowned maxillofacial surgeons with a small chain of cabinets across England, Ireland and Scotland. Her father had served in the British paratroopers as field medic before going into civil practice, following in the footsteps of his father and grand-father. Her mother had been born into a family of doctors, nurses and chemists, so she had studied for dentistry and surgery all the way from high school. Hermione was thus from a well-off, very bourgeois setting, used to nannies, governesses, live-in tutors, and never seeing her parents except for mandatory social holidays. They traveled together all year long, going around their 17 clinics for the truly important patients, some of which could require up to three weeks of intensive care before the Grangers felt it safe to leave the recovery in the hands of local staff.

Hermione was in this sorry state of abuse because she had dared to ask some older girls loitering on the quay for directions. She had been wondering if the first years were grouped together for some introduction seminar, or end-of-summer celebration before school began. When they realized they were facing a newbie, the teenaged girls, all snobby blood-purists from Slytherin and Ravenclaw, had scorned the muggle-born and cast minor pain and injury hexes at her as a kind of disgusting sports game. They went so far as to attribute each other scores for creativity and accuracy with their aim while their victim tried to dodge the six randomized attacks. After about fifteen minutes, they tired of her wailing for help and silenced her with a charm, sending her away after damaging her properties enough to matter, but not enough that the school staff would have reacted when the old administrators and teachers were in place. They were betting that the pain, shame and fear of worse over the coming year would keep the firstie quiet.

Contrary to what all the children in the cabin had believed would happen (except Harry who was still new to this), Draco Malfoy verbally declared himself offended by the way the girl was treated, but left it at that. He didn't give his reasons, but he had them and they were logical.

Firstly; she was of good breeding and proper education, as only such families could afford household staff and live-in tutors, let alone bother to hire them at all. Many rich people didn't actually care for their kids much, and it often showed quite easily. Draco had lost count of the number of teenagers he'd seen that drank and smoked like hardened hit-wizards by age 13.

Secondly; both parents had storied family traditions of service to the Crown and community through medicine, something no High Traditionalist of the Darkes would ever scorn. Healers were the first line of defense against parasites, or epidemics of Dragon Pox and Wizard Flu, so the Welsh Wiccan community put a premium on those professions, especially since they had only one truly well established hospital. And after Dumbledore had mind-raped and potioned several dozen of their best brewers or healers for a century, they were fatally short on qualified medical staff, so that harming one, or a future practitioner, was an overt attack on the entire congregation's survival.

Thirdly; the fact her parents had 17 clinics with clients that came from other countries for them specifically meant reputation, influence and media exposure, thusly 'soft' power. Perhaps even genuine political influence with the British Department of Health or the Professional Orders related to their medicinal specialties, just like the magical guilds regulating potioneers, apothecaries and medi-wizards. Not to mention the money involved, and that was 'hard' power.

All in all, this girl was a resource to be protected and helped along until she developed into an active asset, and maybe even a friend, since she wasn't so much lower than their own standing in society, except for ennobled titles. Besides, if Harry wanted to react, doing something in the same vein could position Draco and his parents well for the near future. Harry would be the Lord Black shortly, Draco had no illusions, so keeping him pleased was important for House Malfoy and his own health.

Standing from his bench, Draco asked Harry to be excused so he could fetch the senior Slytherin prefect to attend the uncouth behavior of the culprits. The teenager would then inform Ravenclaw of the situation so they could settle in-House on their side too. Harry nodded, opening the door for his exit, and asking the boy to bring the Head students if he encountered them on the way. He wanted to meet them, and to give his own displeasure too. Plus, they needed to see what had happened to Hermione for a report to the Heads of Houses, so that the parents were warned via letter. The school was supposed to have put back the policies against bullying, violence, bigotry, racism and blood-purism that Dumbledore had wrecked, and this would show if the job held or not.

It was a very relieved Draco Malfoy who trotted the Express corridor, congratulating himself on having read the room's players and moods correctly. Just last year, he might have been among those casting spells at the young girl for the same reasons. Now though, after their community had imploded so dramatically, he wouldn't be caught dead on those idiot's side of things. It didn't take him long to find the prefects as their carriage was right behind the locomotive, so two away from them. And most of the prefects were present, to review their patrol schedules for when the train was rolling, as well as practice enforcing the new behavior, decorum and etiquette required of the students and faculty. In a departure from the Dumbledorian mentality, prefects were now held to a higher standard of conduct, and would be punished more severely for infractions, which included writing their parents a detailed monthly report and a letter for each detention or those times the cane would be applied.

The prefects were trying to wrap their heads around the new rules booklet, which was a chore compared to the single-sided sheet that had been standard for the last 50 years under the traitor's rule over the castle. Whelp, needs must, and the benefits of having free will and clean bodies was well worth the trouble of memorizing a thirty-odd page manual. Given the size of the font and the images, it wasn't that much of a job either. One of the novelties was that each prefect or head student badge had been charmed to serve as a conditional homing & portkey beacon and as a communication device, by pressing small colored runes on the surface. An idea inspired by the mirrors Gringotts rented to its rich clients. This would make reports between the prefects, teachers, heads of houses and administrators much more rapid and efficient, especially for medical reasons or cases of violence.

The prefects were most certainly not amused that the damned train was barely sounding its whistle for departure that they already had a complaint for violence by a group against a new-blood witch. And the complaint came from the son of the Chairman of the Board of Governors, no less! "Somebody was gonna get their arse reamed the moment they reached school!", the head girl swore with creative vehemence, causing diverse reactions from the students in the room. It was the two head students and two 7th year prefects from the two houses involved that marched to the compartment to take the poor girl's complaint and then hunt the culprits. By the new rules, they would journey to school in shame, isolated one person per room in a new disciplinary wagon that the train was enchanted to generate as needed. The engineer was being warned to trigger the mechanism so that the wagon would come out of its dimensional storage, just before the caboose at the end of the convoy. The wagon had sixteen small cells, two rows of eight, so they wouldn't need another one any time soon, especially when the head boy announced on the PA system what had happened, and what consequences the girls faced once arrived.

Twelve strokes of the rattan cane on bare buttocks, before the assembled school, at dinner.

Corporal punishment was back in force, since most of the student populace wouldn't be getting doped or Imperiused into being blindly obedient slaves anymore. The Board and Ministry expected Hogwarts to get back to the same normal routines that all the other small village and parochial schools experienced with children or teens, so the Board had recommended going back to tried & true basics. However, the application would be severely monitored and never occur without parental approval at each event. Nobody would have the right to give the school blanket permissions. Nor could any teacher or staffer involve an 'exception of major force' to bypass the rules and protocols surrounding the punishment's safeguards. The children would be corrected, forcibly so, but not beaten, injured or damaged by brutes who couldn't control themselves.

That was seen as a bad news for most of the kids, but not all. Some saw it as the just rewards for bullies, bigots and those who tried to use their upper society status to violate the younger or less fortunate members of the school population. There had even been cases of students with rich or titled families trying to intimidate teachers into giving them better grades, or else they would make false complaints to their parents to have their career destroyed. No more would such things occur in Hogwarts, not without publicly seen and felt consequences at least.

Hermione was impressed far more, and far more positively, by the strong, quick reaction of the student prefecture than she had been by her assailants and their much vaunted Pureblood roots. She planned to speak of it with the head of whichever House she ended in tonight, at sorting. She was even more impressed that the very son of the Board's chairman had taken the lead in things, not a common event in her awareness of such matters.

The rest of the trip was passed in peace as the potential delinquents had seen first hand what awaited those who flaunted the rules like stubborn mules, or snobbish wannabees. Harry had invited Hermione to sit in the safety of his compartment for the voyage, to make certain nobody sought retaliation against her for her courage to denounce the attack. She spent the rest of the way in pensive quiet, as she got quite the upper-level education in the civics, politics, religion and Family affairs of the Magical World. When she heard that the so-called Wizarding Britain was only the Welsh Wiccan sect, a very small group of humans drowned amongst the vast rest of all other magical groups, sects and species, she didn't know what to think. That wasn't how things had been presented to her last year, when she had been approached by McGonagall.

{ HP } --- { Not so festive Sorting feast } --- { HP }

Headmaster Daxit Jasper Deridex, a half-blood without named House, was most importuned by the report the Head Students had filed just as the Hogwarts Express was leaving the station. Already a muggle-born girl had been attacked by six girls, on grounds of blood-purism and being supposedly a poor bint without a Galleon to her name.

Well, that wouldn't do.

Looking at his deputy headmistress, Jacynthe Clemencia, another half-blood but from the wizarding House of Radner by alliance, he saw her pursed lips and dangerous glare as she read the notice. The small memorandum had appeared in the secured Gringotts mailbox that linked the school administrators' offices with the prefects' compartment on the train, an innovation suggested by Lord Peverell – Potter. The simplicity of the system and its reliability just showed how corrupt and criminal Dumbledore was to have resisted its implementation for decades.

The school's new financial comptroller and deputy to Gringotts affairs, Malcolm Sandhurst, a pureblood (second son) from the minor wizarding House of Sandhurst, read the letter with obvious disdain. He was from a 'Light' oriented house that had resisted the Darkness in both magicks and politics for nearly nine generations. The teenaged girls' behavior was abhorrent to him, and a symptom of what had gone wrong under Dumbledore's regime of endless chances and active sympathy for bullies, if they kissed the tip of his wand in the prescribed manner. Malcolm had no desire to see that felonious depravity repeated, not after all the harm that he had caused across their society, so this attack would have to get quashed hard.

The rules were clear enough, the kids would just have to live with them or ask their parents to get them educated elsewhere than Hogwarts.

The rest of the day was spent in preparing the badly damaged but still serviceable castle and grounds into shape for the coming students. The house-elves now numbered 140, up from 95 before the investigations began. The green-skinned servile beings were all a-twitter with glee at having so much work and efforts to produce the results asked by the Board and Ministry, plus the new administrators, new teachers and new healers... All those many new people to help! Yes, the elves were in an Earthly version of Paradise, especially since now they would have the right to interact openly with the students or their visiting kin, unlike the previous policy that ordered them to be invisible at all times.

When the express arrived, the school was deemed functional and ready; not perfect and not even optimal, but workable for the purposes required. The more complex tasks like the wards would need several years just to plan properly, let alone implement, so the entire community had no choice but to have patience and faith that things would get better, some day in the near future.

The students were given the traditional welcome; the old ones traveled by small coaches pulled by thestrals while the first years got to see the castle from the antique wooden dories as they crossed the Black Lake. The firsties were all placed in the foyer next to the great hall, waiting for their sorting feast as it had been done for ten centuries. As usual, the deputy headmistress came to fetch them and present them to the assembled school population. The Sorting Hat was resting on a small pouf upholstered in heavy brocade that represented all the House colors. It looked more inviting and comfortable than the rickety old three-legged stool from previous years.

The Sorting Hat amazed the new students by animating itself and singing an inspiring canticle about faith, community and mutual support, before announcing it was ready for the year to begin.

As Madam Clemencia read aloud their names, the children went to sit on the pouf to be sorted by House into Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw or Slytherin. Then they were grouped by Ward of Hogwarts, scholarship, regular student, noble (scion, heir or lord), titled nobility (scion, heir or Lord), and finally the possible categories of guild membership; apprentice (acolyte), yeoman (journeyman) or mastery candidate. The old students were watching carefully as they too would be undergoing the Sorting Hat anew to gain their missing classifications to guide them towards formal study help or career paths.

Susan Bones was sorted into Hufflepuff, titled nobility heir, but no guild affiliation. She was however declared to be aimed towards combat & defense and divinations for a possible career in DMLE or the aurors like her aunt. Alternatively, an internship in the Wizarding Ministry of Magic could also be a fitting career for the voluble, well connected young girl.

Hermione Granger was sorted into Ravenclaw, status unclear as the Hat recommended she pass a Heritage Ritual before completing that part. She was offered apprenticeships in the guilds for arithmancers, rune crafters, scribes & accountants, scholars or educators. She could also petition for an internship at the Wizarding Ministry of Magic, for her legalistic outlook would help the community greatly to modernize in the coming decades, if she assisted the Wizengamot directly.

Neville Longbottom was sorted into Hufflepuff, titled nobility heir, apprenticeships available with the guilds of herbologists, apothecaries or landscapers, at his choice. The Sorting Hat also mentioned that Neville should look into druid conclaves for a possible novice or acolyte status.

Draco Malfoy was sorted into Slytherin, titled nobility heir, apprenticeships available with the guilds of apothecaries or potion brewers, at his choice. Alternatively, he could prefer to have yeoman training with the guild for scribes & accountants to work in the Ministry's fiscal department.

Harold Potter, Black & Peverell was sorted into Slytherin, titled nobility reigning Lord, and offered yeoman training in combat & defense, divinations, scriptworkes, herbology, potions, alchemy and healing. He was also offered special tutorship for his Parselmagic. The tutor would have to be found and paid separately from the rest of the school's tuition fees, since Harry would probably be his only trainee this year.

All the sortings of Harry Potter's relatives and friend made the crowd react, even some of the staff at the long central table, on the raised platform. An uncouth lout of a first year boy with rust red hair and absolutely no manners jumped up after Harry's sorting, screaming so hard he was blue in the face from the effort. He was yelling at Harry that he was a Dark wizard, an apostle of evil, a demon worshiper, a slimy snake who spoke to other snakes about their slime, to stay away from his family and especially his sister Ginny, and much more until it descended into threats and pulling out his old, battered wand to aim at Harry's face. The boy had no chance to cast anything as his Head of House had descended upon him like a thunderstorm, grabbing his arm to aim the dangerous tool at the ceiling then yank the offending device out of his weak, indecisive grasp. Taking hold of the squirming boy's left ear in a merciless grip, the woman frog-marched the young delinquent to the front of the great hall where she forced him to kneel on the cold hard flagstone floor, with his nose against the riser of the platform.

A few minutes later, and the boy in question was made to sit on the pouf to be sorted. He was named Ronald Bilius Weasley, got placed into Gryffindor, scholarship student, with the Hat strongly recommending an apprenticeship in the guild of farmers and ranchers. Supposedly, they knew how to handle bucking and biting young colts, to break them into usable beasts. Upon which comment, he was sent to sit on a long wooden bench at the very front of the hall, next to the door to the teacher's antechamber where they sometimes held meetings, with students or each other, when they needed a private space. The six girls from the train were already there.

After the sorting closed, Headmaster Deridex stood at the podium of the golden owl to address the students. He gave them an overview of the important rules that had been implemented, and especially about bullying, violence, armed assault with wands, bigotry, racism and blood-purism that would no longer be tolerated as 'laddishness'. Upon which he motioned for the seven students sitting aside the rest to come stand before the platform for judgment.

The man elocuted the accusations, investigation method and proof against all the six teenaged girls, concluding with their sentence. It was hard to say if the girls paled so much because they feared the promised pain, the shame of being bared in front of the crowd, or the letter that would be going home immediately after the Feast. If their parents accepted the conclusions, the girls would be caned tomorrow just before dinner, but if they refused the punishment or the conclusion of the process, they would be suspended at home until matters were solved between adults. In which case, their victim may want to involve the aurors.

Ronald Weasley was not so lucky. He had insulted the person, blood-status, Family, titles, ranks and styles, mancies, occult practices, Faith and good name of a new student. That said student was a sitting Warlock of the Wizengamot seemed to have escaped the rabid child's delusions of what 'Good Gryffindor Light wizards' were supposed to be. And that was another problem; the boy was a hard-core devotee of Dumbledore who thought that Harry Potter had brought low the old Headmaster to be able to corrupt the 'Light' into going dark and evil. The child was thusly suspended at home immediately, and would be sent back via Floo network for a meeting with his parents to determine what happened next. If he came back, it would be to a severe public caning and multiple restrictions, especially on his right to have a wand or focus only under supervision.

The entire student body cringed in phantom pain at that idea. Canings were bad but pretty much ordinary in the Welsh Wiccan wizarding community. But ordering a wizard to only have his wand when somebody was there to control what he did with it was almost as bad as the potions or compulsions that Dumbledore had used. Clearly, the Board of Governors and the Wizengamot weren't playing the fools with their population's best school anymore.

The rest of the feast was done in peace, with the culprits being made to eat in isolation in the antechamber. They would also be kept apart from the general population in a disciplinary dormitory next to the infirmary until their parents made their decisions, including for the entire class day tomorrow. That policy of separating the trouble makers and delinquents from the good kids would now be applied to any case that involved caning, suspension, expulsion or the involvement of DMLE and aurors. And Mystra help the poor fool who got the Unspeakables to visit the school because of Anathema or Unspeakable Acts. They would be expelled, have their wand broken, and be tried before the full Wizengamot to see if Azkaban or the Veil were necessary to remedy the crimes committed.

{ HP } --- { Beginning life as Hogwarts students } --- { HP }

The first day was rough for a lot of people. The new teachers were stiff as boards and almost afraid of their students at times. Given that several of them now had the full uses of their nobility and peerage privileges, and a few were actually reigning Lord of their Houses, it could be understood. Hogwarts had become a veritable political and social minefield, with some kids having more weight on their shoulders than the school's newly hired career administrators.

One of the first changes was that the Heads of Houses were no longer professors or teachers, but only administrators and resource personnel for the students and their families. They didn't teach anything, but had office hours in the evening and kept watch all through the night to enforce curfew and safety bounds firmly. Something that the Weasley twins found out at their pained expenses right in the first week, when they tried to go out to the Forbidden Forest to collect rare components for their experimental joke products. That caning was seen by all staff and most students as three years in the making, and well deserved by both delinquents. What wasn't expected was for their father to come to school three days later to put them over his knee one after the other, right in the middle of their common room because of the utter stupidity they showed in disregarding their own safety by wanting to gallivant in the forest at night. With two bare-bottom spankings in them before the second week of class was done, the twins got the message right quick that things were no longer in their favor. Their usual routine of being the playful freckled clowns wasn't an asset anymore, just a pain in their arses, so they stopped.

Fancy that notion? Peaceful Weasley twins that didn't bother anybody.

Miracles do happen, if you work for them hard enough; magic doesn't do everything on its own.

Besides that, the importance and resources for the classes had been changed.

Ancient Runes was changed into "scriptworkes and artistic medias" that would serve to teach the students the art of calligraphy, drawing figures or entities, writing a text in a logical fashion, and how to read or write runic sequences for basic temporary charms or wards. This would be done all of first year with ink on paper or scrap leather. Then the second years would progress to molding runes in wet clay or wood scraps, and try to produce standard sequences, like the silencing ward normally used on beds in the dorms. By third year, they would follow the ICW standards as the Ministry had acquiesced the Board's opinion to just use the international tests and scores to harmonize with everybody. This course was elaborated with help from the scribes & accountants' guild, as well as the rune-masters' guild

Arithmancy was merged with muggle mathematics and been brought back as a vital class taught from the first year up. It would show the students the bases of regular arithmetic, geometry, volumetry, weights, distances, chronology, algebra and statistics. This course was elaborated in concert with the scribes & accountants' guild to help groom future members properly.

With Trelawney gone and Dumbledore no longer influencing the decisions, the Divinations class was back into being a primary and vital course. It concerned all the spells and techniques to acquire or produce information, triage it, manage it, and produce reports. This class covered basics like the 'Point-Me' charm, the 'Itemic Lore' charm, and harder spells like the lesser necromancy 'History of Death' charm used by aurors in investigations. Prophecies, Oracles and such wild Gifts were discussed as generic knowledge but the Sorting Hat hadn't pointed out anybody with Seer potential, so no tutor for the subject was sought out by the school.

The old Defense class was revamped into two distinct groups; the basic "Student Self-Defense" and the professional grade "Duel, Combat & Warfare". This was to help the Ministry pre-screen candidates for the DMLE, auror and hit-wizard training programs post-Hogwarts. A formal Dueling club was put in place, led by Professor Flitwick who had changed classes to lead the upper-strength fighting classes instead of charms as he used to.

Herbology and charms were merged to become a consolidated class of hedge-craft under the tutelage of Professor Sprout, who felt it was good to return to the traditional witchcraft of yore. This position was a bit hard to swallow for the male dominated Gamot, but had received the support from most of the Board and the majority of parents. Children would thusly learn about gardening for food, spices, medicinal herbs, and recreational herbs, farming & ranching, while also getting homestead charms with basic wards & enchanting too. The course included a lot of Do-it-yourself know-how to maintain and repair one's equipment for dwelling or work. The class would approach the ancestral Faiths of the Welsh Wiccan sect and other groups, as well as teach the bases of Ritual Magicks to steer kids away from dangerous things they shouldn't try without adult supervision.

The Potions class was completely revamped, to become a consolidated fermenting & distillery, potions brewing and alchemic sciences course, with modules of each at each year of progression. The class was to teach the best and most efficient way to use basic raw ingredients and prepare them for the maximal effect on a limited schedule. This would now also include spells to wash the equipments, portion components and shield the cauldron from contaminants. Basic spells like stasis, filtration, refining, purification and quality controller would be mandatory as of first year. It was a clear difference from preceding years, especially since the class was moved to the seventh floor to have skylights opened to vent out fumes or explosions, instead of spreading the mess through the dungeons.

The newly established class for basic homestead healing and apothecary arts would prove to be a wild success with the kids. It replaced the not-at-all lamented 'health module' in the potions class that had been taught by Professor Snape. The man had enjoyed it even less than his charges, but the new version was much more oriented towards practical applications of traditional remedies and techniques, as well as modern ones, but not so much theory as before since the hedge-craft and potions classes would take care of most of that. The healing course amusingly covered potential familiars and farm animals as much as humans, house-elves and other common species of the greater magical world. One of the basic and most important lessons of the first year was to teach students how to recognize the signs of mental manipulations in a being's attitude, then how to use spells to check for potions, compulsions or mind-rape. It also covered recreational potions and herbs, drunkenness and accidental overdoses of prescribed/self medication the same way.

Astronomy was now given in the day in a classroom converted to have the walls and ceilings show the segment of the night sky to examine. The equipment was just slightly modernized, but not much. It was still traditional for true astronomers to buy a very basic telescope or sextant and personally customize the devices to suit their particular needs and mancies. Nobody complained about it when it was explained correctly, for once in a century.

The old history of magic class was revamped entirely and was now consolidated into "History of the Magical Worlds" to have all magical species of Earth, and certain chosen sectors of the connective demi-planes covered properly. The class would also have frank examination of religions, faiths, occult movances, sects and guilds, and several types of magical practices that had disappeared or were still used only in forlorn corners of the planet.

The old muggle studies class was revoked and replaced entirely by the British national history curriculum from Eton college. Once informed properly of what Eton was, and what the criteria for a successful student career at the school were, none of the Gamot's Warlocks wanted to oppose the idea, and neither did the Board members. The difference was that now that course would be offered from first year on as a vital core class too.

The options from third year on were being slated as; estate & business management, generic secretarial & clerkship, magical artistry, prospection & mining techniques, curse-breaking, ward-laying, advanced crafting & embedding, scholarly research technician, aide-nurse (orderly), restaurant chef (butchering, cooking, baking, etc...), and factory-scaled food transformation (dry-packed, brined, canned, spell-frozen and fresh/stasis-packed).

Every student could see easily the overwhelming influence of the professional trades, and mercantile guilds in the new setup of the courses and curriculum. The switch over to ICW tests and scores across the school was welcome by the kids and their parents with a sigh of relief as it meant that the pupils no longer had to take a second set of exams in Basel or another foreign testing center to have their diplomas recognized as valid across all the ICW jurisdiction. British diplomas had become so meaningless in the last 100 years that the OWL's were not even counted as worth anything unless they were passed under ICW control, an infamous distinction that not even the worse, least civilized countries of the organization had ever suffered from.

Yes, the work & business focus was a bit upsetting to certain fringe students who wanted to have a generic, no frills schooling to have plenty of time for socializing and taking life easy before their Family or House duties settled on them, but they were minority. Likewise, the other fringe that liked having a very loose and airy schedule with weak teachers were upset because all the self-studying and external tutoring they had wanted their parents to pay would no longer fit in the new, much heavier calendar, with much stronger, standardized education methods throughout.

In the vast majority however, the changes in classes were satisfying. The changes of staff were also well seen, despite a few outliers who would never be satisfied with anything, mostly because their capacity to bully or snob others had been removed. Which might explain why the student body at large viewed these novelties as appropriate and desirable in such a short time, no matter the uglier sides like fewer personal liberty and public punishments in the great hall.

{ HP } --- { High & low points of the year } --- { HP }

For many students who were born or raised in wizarding households, the better parts were the renewed history course, the use of High Traditional calendar days and markers for the festivities, and the respect given to their Families who had endured for centuries to build this congregation.

Their low points were that new-bloods (muggle-born) were given just as much respect and rights if their birthing and social status was 'comparable' in the muggle side of things. This also brought in the reality that white skinned men no longer held sway over the British Empire as they did for four hundred years, nor could they crush and demean women anymore. The addition of specism as yet another punishable crime was really grinding on some nerves, but the history classes now showed them just how deeply deluded their notions of superiority to goblins, dwarves or Fae had been for so long. At least, they weren't being compared to Illithids, Githyanki, or Beholders for the purpose of evaluating societies. Then again, almost nobody knew anything about those populations, and the biological data were the scarce minimum obtained by visual encounters.

For those born or raised in the mundane side of England, the benefits were the clear effort put into matching and maintaining international standards as they had always thought in terms of being mobile to follow the jobs where they happened. The second best thing was that they were riding a wave of modernization that gave them access to magical subjects and teachings that were not even possible just a year before. Their education would be almost twice more dense and thrice more capable than their predecessors who had finished Hogwarts already. The best, most dramatic benefit was that each new-blood child was given the Awakening Rite in one of the ritual chambers of Hogwarts, thus augmenting and purifying their connection with their magic and lifeforce unlike their forebears ever had.

The downsides were that the anti-bullying rules and capacity to involve the authorities in cases of property or bodily damages resulting from racism or fanaticism meant that several rich or noble Purebloods tried to push the system to the breaking point. This was done by repeatedly attacking those students seen as the leading mudbloods, even when they were punished multiple times to the point of expulsion. Then they left for Durmstrang Institute where Headmaster Karkarof had put in place a blanket pardon policy for those that got kicked out of Hogwarts due to the "Repression of the innate nobility and superiority of Pureblood lines". Some twenty young men and nine young ladies had used that escape path after vicious, vindictive attacks on students who were not of their liking.

In three instances, half-blood or muggle-born teachers had been injured badly enough while defending the victims of bullying to warrant calling the aurors to apprehend the suspects as they were fleeing Britain, after leaving school without permission. This social movance was fueled by racial and religious fanatics with little to lose since they were geriatric, or so young they had no established life holding them back. They managed to cause a community-wide backlash against the modernization, and many tried to have the Wizengamot vote roll-backs of the rules and changes, to no avail yet.

Harry and his friends had a rather different view of events as they unfolded.

Firstly, Harry was in privately paid tutorship as much as he was in public classes, thus making for a very tight and loaded schedule six days per week. He had wisely chosen Saturday as his one day of the week that nothing short of an emergency Wizengamot meeting could encroach. Everything else was set back to Monday or Tuesday. Sunday was kept for religious and spiritual training in the Faith, Creed and Causes of the Hadean cult. Not because they valued that day, they weren't christians and had no use for one specific day of the week. No, Harry's reasoning was that his religious studies were mostly self-taught, at his own rhythm, and he could turn in early to be relatively healthy and good humored on the following Monday morning. Thankfully, the school had opted to keep a good number of snow days, holidays and seasonal festivals through the year to let the students and teachers blow off steam before things escalated to badly.

Harry still had to attend the Gamot once a month, and his Lordship duties towards his families were also sapping a lot of his time and reserves of patience on a daily basis. Thankfully, he had managed to change his mindset about a few things inside of September or he'd have had a burnout right quick. Firstly, he finally gave in to Rehz's opinion about finding a new house-elf to take care of the trunk, errand and couriering. While Harry now ate most of the time in the great hall, he did have a private Lord's suite where he constantly received guests for political or economic reasons, as well as old allies of the Houses Potter and Black that wanted to see where it would all go. That meant having refreshments and snacks at hand, depending on how long the meeting would last, and if the goblins had to come for crafting and signing contracts. So, the child had finally let himself finish his grief over Dryskholl's cruel death and chosen a new elf from a list proposed by his account manager. Harry also maintained a series of twice weekly meetings with the five persons he had ridden the Express with, because they were extended family and because Hermione had a lot of potential as friend and House-ally in the near future.

{ HP } --- { Heritages & threats } --- { HP }

When the first week-end of October arrived, Harry and Hermione went to Gringotts together. She had booked a Heritage Blood-Tithe Ritual to figure out what the Sorting Hat had alluded at, while dreading what it could reveal about her ancestors. Harry needed to complete the procedures for the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, to obtain Lordship over the living members and estates concerned before frauds or government bureaucrats tried something like Umbridge.

Hermione was revealed to be the Heiress Presumptive of the Ancient and Noble House of Dagworth-Granger, which had produced some of the most reputed potioneers, apothecaries and healers that the Welsh Wiccan sect had seen. She was the 'Presumptive' Heiress instead of 'Lady-Elect' because she wasn't the only one alive in the House, adult members still existed around her, but she was the only one with active magicks that were confirmed. So the goblins had no qualms about processing her demand for the full Heritage Ritual to take on the title, rank and style of the dormant House. This implied that the girl now had to undergo the Awakening Rite like Harry had done, but much older, more mature, and with a vial of Given Blood put in stasis by Hector Dagworth-Granger at the height of his Powers and social preeminence. With Ancestral Blood confirming her origins and activating the sleeping 'Blood Compact' inside her genetic memory, the girl confirmed her position as 'Heiress Ascendant' then waited a few hours to complete the Heritage as Head of House, reigning Lady of Dagworth-Granger. It was a very changed, thoughtful girl that left Gringotts that evening.

Harry's business with the Lordship was quick and relatively simple, since none of the living Blacks or extended relations had any grounds to contest the elevation. Neither Narcissa, Lucius or Draco had deigned to protest or offer a Magical Heirship Challenge, much to the surprise of Andromeda Tonks and several watchers of British magical nobility and politics. In fact, the Malfoy Family was present at the ritual, to show openly their support and satisfaction with the new Master of the House.

The Welsh Wiccan Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, pushed by who knows what defective instincts or foul advice, had tried to intercept Harry in person, on the steps of Gringotts no less, to stop the ritual on the grounds that Sirius Black had not yet been exonerated by the Wizengamot or Crown. He claimed that the Black title, rank and style were locked in abeyance, along with the estate and businesses, until the Warlocks could deliberate and adjudicate the case in serenity. This could, of course, be hastened if Harry submitted to the Gamot for inspection and validation by open vote, regardless of the rank or seniority of the houses. Including the Ministry Department Heads in that vote would go a long way in appeasing the disdains, fears and angers, expressed by several venerable men of great status in Nature, Magyck and society. These old men were upset that a mere child held three Lordships when they, themselves, were available to accomplish the powerful tasks of these positions in his stead, as was right and proper for children to let go unto men of import and might of wand. The minister strongly intimated that Harry could go a long way towards proving his good faith to the Ministry by naming three Regents and Stewards, one of each post for each House, until he turned 27 years old. Fudge had a list of older, mature and respectable men that would reliably fit these jobs, in the Ministry's formal opinion.

Harry replied that he would acknowledge the Minister's request as valid only if it were deposed his demands and list of names before king Ragnok on a blood-sealed Ministry form with the names of all the original plaintiffs signed in blood as well, to bind them all to the Gamot and Ministerial resolution. The Minister looked at Harry with something akin to genuine, gut-deep fear for a second, before removing himself from the goblin territory, now that he remembered just who he was accosting, and where it was happening. The first thing Harry did inside the bank was ask for a copy of the two door sentries' memories of the encounter so he could file a grievance against Cornelius Fudge at the DMLE and Wizengamot Services for conspiracy of attempted Blood-Line Theft. Plus, the man had tried to hijack the heredity rituals of three titled noble Houses, to put them in the hands of a structured cabal for the debasement of Peerage, entitlement, nobility and Chartered Families.

These heretical sacrileges would NEVER be tolerated in Magical Britain.

After that malicious piece of crapulence had been dealt with, the passing of the Black Lordship was mostly perfunctory. It was the second time that Harry used the ritual chambers under Gringotts, so he felt welcome and safe. Looking at king Ragnok to the side of the altar, he commented that the feeling he got was similar to the Van Uttebatten chamber, where the honored ancestors were close and watching upon them kindly. Unaware of the monarch's pleasure at the compliment, Harry processed the ritual with alacrity and stoicism as the Black Magicks wanted to test the boundaries and flexibility of his morality, looking for weaknesses or faults that would disqualify him, or give the Magick and heirlooms the right to kill him. However, after the scandal of the late Lord's manner of death, the Family's Magick seemed to understand the need to change and adapt if it wanted the Lineage to survive the coming hardships.

Harry left the bank late in the evening, accompanied by Hermione and the Malfoys, unaware of the two aurors and one Unspeakable who were disillusioned, watching from separate rooftops around Diagon Alley. The boy and his allies walked to the public Floo chimney without ever realizing the danger they were in. Dark forces were now moving in the shadows, and their time of safety and friendship was running out faster than they could imagine.

{ HP } --- { Halloween, and again this are bad } --- { HP }

Things were mostly peaceful or easily handled in Hogwarts itself until the night of All Hallow's Eve. Harry was trying to concentrate on preparing his usual prayers for his dead kindred when his female elf, Jippsy, came to him with a missive from Lord Malfoy that a surprise emergency Wizengamot meeting was being held with less than the required quorum in attempt to pass fraudulent laws. The goal was to bolster the Minister's own powers and authority over the ennobled houses, including those who had been created under Royal Warrant before the Gamot even existed, which was treason. The presence of as many Lords as possible was required to block this scurrilous attempt, and to have the felonious minister arrested for trial.

Warning his friends who had planned to be by his side during the evening of prayers, he cast a few quick spells to change into his battle kit as he had managed to assemble it, and used his suite's active Floo to pass through. As a measure of security, Harry had never used the Floo in his trunk to connect directly to the Ministry, afraid that the Unspeakables or bureaucrats could try to track his address and movements once the signal was established as his. He arrived in his private Lord Peverell office in the Wizengamot's floor, and carefully cast what few divination spells he knew to peruse the area around his door. Seeing nothing bad, he unlocked it and walked out, going towards the main amphitheater where the illegal meeting was being held.

On the way he found Lords Malfoy, Nott, Parkinson, Sandhurst, and Ladies Bones, Longbottom and even Madam Marchbanks, walking towards the same direction. Seeing the gravity of the attempted coup by the Ministry against the hereditary Families and Peerage, the Heads of Houses girded themselves for a fight. All were happy to see the others had worn dueling or combat robes for the seditious event they would be crashing.

A quartet of young Pureblood aurors without important names or affiliations other than their generic magical ancestry and white skin guarded the locked doors, trying desperately to look brave when they realized face-to-face just what kinds of Power and Arms they challenged. One male auror, barely twenty-five years old and puffed up like a turkey in mating season tried to bullshit the Lords into submitting to him.

"Halt! In the name of the Ministry DMLE!" he showed them a glowing new gold badge with the words 'DMLE - Head Auror' embossed on top. Which was weird since Rufus Scrimgeour was supposed to still be the top auror in their community, at last they knew. "I am the chief of criminal investigations and arrests, by order of Minister Fudge! You will surrender your wands and be escorted back out of the building. The Ministry is locked down for important business, and nobody is allowed in." Then, turning to the three fearfully shaking beginners, he commanded them loudly "Seize the fucking little plunker before he disappears! It'll save us a trip to Hogwarts tomorrow. And be careful of those knives, they ain't for show! My cousin saw him use one in school, a few weeks back, and he's good with 'em. Just cast some good expelliarmus at him and he'll cave in quick. He's a kid and doesn't even have a real wand, just a damned wooden spoon he carved a few years back."

Harry was in no mood to be insulted, let alone be arrested for no valid reason by some fraudsters participating in a botched coup d'état that couldn't even get off the pub napkin where it was drawn without setting the tavern on fire. He called his Battlestaff out of the shrunken trunk at his neck to let it float besides his left arm while taking out his hatchet in the left hand and the pistol from his back with the right hand. The four newbie aurors saw the very worse scenario unfold before their eyes as a fully empowered Lord of Magick marched unto war.

Before any of them had the chance to raise a wand to cast anything, it was over. Offended beyond belief and words, Madam Marchbanks had cast a mass-area disarming charm that had grabbed all the primary wands, secondary wands, shield rings and badges from the youths in one fell move that left them gap-mouthed at the sheer capacity of the old crone. They never got to say anything in protest or their own defense because Madam Bones had just used two wands to multi-cast four distinct stunners locked with an old German password to keep them asleep for the full 24 hours the spell could hold if not unlocked or dispelled. They found that the doors of the Gamot were locked physically but not magically as the quorum was not had, so the wards did not engage, a visible refusal by the ancient building to sanctify the outrages being committed inside.

With every hand carrying a weapon, and both Lord Malfoy and Harry having a phantom arm to carry a third melee item as well, Griselda Marchbanks used her authority as lawful Chief-Witch to force the activation of the Protocols & Procedures of Session to command the opening for the arriving Ladies, Lords and Regents. She could hear others that had been summoned to attend when the sacrilege had been discovered, and at least a dozen were marching up behind them, with another dozen after that before quorum was had and the session could proceed fully.

As the large oak panels moved ponderously, Harry enacted a small spell from 'Tricks of the Trade' to have a slow, pompous ceremonial dirge play aloud around the entire room and corridor as they entered and took strategic positions rather than their traditional seats. The first arrived stormed the surprised, fear-struck Ministry officials and Lords who were about to vote on some unlawful bill or project already tabled and read into docket. Cornelius Fudge was sitting in his pinstriped robes with his green bowler hat on the desk before him, not at all bothering with the decorum or rules of the Gamot since not a single plum colored uniform was in sight anywhere. Besides him were seated the hard-right fascist supporter Bartemius Crouch Senior, Head of the Department of International Cooperation, and the Darkness follower Walden MacNair, executioner of dangerous beasts for the Ministry's Department of Creature Regulation. The scribe in service was the junior that had been Imperiused by Dolores Umbridge, raising questions about his true mindset and allegiances yet again. Maybe he had been spelled willingly as a ruse?

Madam Bones gestured towards the stunned young man that had been floated in by the Lady Zabini, while other Warlocks brought in the remaining three posers to expose their perfidy to the open public. To the consternation of the traitor Lords, the few friendly reporters they had invited to attend what they saw as a moment of Power and Glory would now be writing about their Fall from their seats of authority, right to imprisonment, and maybe even being Cast Out by their own Houses. It could only get worse if the muggle monarchy got involved. All of them would rather be killed, be transfigured to ash and then be flushed down the toilets than be judged by muggles.

Harry Potter stood in the middle of the larger, bulkier and better trained adults that he had walked in with, shamelessly using their mass and experience to shield his own weakness. He was proud of his accomplishments, but not stupid enough that he stood much of a chance against all of the assembled Gamot members and their bureaucrat allies if wands were drawn. His best chance at distance was his pistol, or some wandless spells he had learned for close range. He wanted to be heard at the moment of judgment, not attract attention in the middle of a fight when everybody, their dog and the dog's fleas could probably take him out with cantrips. Or at least, that was his evaluation of his strength versus the Welsh Wiccan adults. He had forgotten how badly Dumbledore had amputated the course programs for a century, and mangled what was left to suit his need for mindless, miseducated worshipers that followed his words without proofs.

Cornelius Fudge tried to blubber his way out of the very obvious open grave that was yawning at his feet when Barty Crouch spoke aloud, surprising everyone. "You have it here, before you, the proof that the boy is wild, delinquent, and out of control. Look at how he tries to command the adults around him, standing in their midst as a monarch." He said in his arrogant voice, tone regal and manners fitting the Head of an Ancient and Noble wizarding House. With a sneer of disdain common to all Purebloods when they look at mud-bloods and subhumans, the old man with the Hitler-like mustachio, dark black pinstripe robes and black short top hat pointed a rolled scroll at the child with glee. "You are too late, boy! The writ of arrest, containment and removal of your Lord rings by the Unspeakables has been voted already! Your spies were too late! We may have been betrayed tonight, but we, the Purebloods of Human Wizardry, will still have gain of cause this day! You, boy, will end in Azkaban for your absolute disrespect of our age, Power and almight before Mystra, Mother of All Magycks! Submit to the magicks of the Law of Britain!" he screamed rabidly in a spatz of self-induced delirium as he waved the scroll towards Harry.

Madam Marchbanks was not impressed, and not afraid to say so. "Oh yeah, Crouch? And if that piece of toilet paper is truly legal, then why did you have to pass it under quorum, without the chamber wards active, or any of the actual Most Ancient and Most Noble Houses? Why is it, boy, that you felt the need to scurry in the dark, behind every loyal Britannic wizard of our nation? Speak up, sneak-about! I'm not hard of hearing, but I can't hear you!" she railed at him in great glee at his sudden puce coloration when he realized who he was affronting tonight.

Lord Malfoy contributed his own venom, stating in chilling urbane tones that belied the true extent of his ire, "Cornelius, I had thought you had a modicum of common sense, but I stand corrected. You are clearly not able to whelm a single whit of brain matter under that hat! How did you think my voting block would react, tomorrow, when this law appeared in the papers? You just tried to commit the kidnapping of a seated Warlock via the aurors by unlawful warrant, Line-Defilement and Line-Theft via Unspeakables against all laws of the land, and threatened to shove a reigning Lord of three ennobled Houses into Azkaban without a lawful trial on sham charges, just like Dumbledore did with the last Lord Black. Congratulations for not learning the lesson of what happens to conspiracies the first time around, Fudge! Bagnold is dead and Crouch was already under investigation by Madam Bones for his involvement in Sirius Black's unlawful arrest, sending to prison, and then the illegal banishment, and here you are, sitting by his side to repeat his failed plan anew. Good show, Cornelius, good show on seeing just how stupid this all is!"

Minister Fudge tried to faff around for an escape route, so he grasped at straws to save his elections, and possibly his freedom as well, if Bones and Marchbanks weren't neutered. "But Lucius! Think about the great boon I'm getting for your House and descendants! The title of Lord Black back into Pureblood hands, who also have the Black blood in their veins! Your son Draco could rule that House properly, unlike this half-blood mongrel who accaparates titles, ranks and styles he should never even say aloud, and certainly never put his filthy mud-blood hands on! The sight of those rings on those hands! For shame! Only a proper Pureblood should ever hold such almight and entitlements in our Welsh Wiccan community!"

Shaking his head in a desperate attempt to deny the full imbecility of the man he helped to elect in the position, Lucius replied "You cretin! I went to Gringotts with my wife and son to bear witness and accept publicly the new Lord Black! I gave my oath to the Black Blood-Law! What do you think would happen to me and my family if I did anything to accept or support this cabal of cur knaves that surround you? Would you see the House of Malfoy squibbed or dead? Is that the gratefulness that you demonstrate for that money and assistance at getting people to vote for you as Minister?"

Madam Zabini snorted in contempt, declaring in a soft but strong voice that carried all around the room on the force of her charms; "Of course, he wants to see you squibbed or dead. He wants to kill off all the old Families and titled nobles so that only elected and Ministry nominated minions could ever hold power and authority in Magical Britain again. It's not a favor to you or other Pureblood Lords, it's a genocide against all of our Hallowed Lineages! The use of the Potter boy's situation is just a transparent excuse to rail against the very privileges that him and Crouch have pined after for decades! I certainly remember little Horny-Corny from Hogwarts, always snooping around the rich and titled, trying to get scraps of attention or alms for his services at doing somebody's homework or term paper for them. I'm willing to bet he was elected because Dumbledore wanted a docile puppet, not because of anything you did, Lucius." she closed with toxic words that didn't in any ways reduce the truths she spoke.

Amelia Bones snorted, kicking lightly the stunned boor at her feet, mentioning "Not to mention that trying to make changes to the hierarchy of the aurors and hit-wizards is my jurisdiction alone. The Ministry's political and judicial wings are NEVER supposed to interfere in the DMLE's internal policies or promotion schedules. You crossed a line that only tyrants and Dark Lords have ever crossed willingly, Cornelius. History will not remember you kindly. But from a cell in Azkaban, you won't have to care for public opinion polls and voting basins anymore."

Puffing himself even more, like a balloon about to rupture, Minister Fudge shouted "NO! I won't go to prison! I am the Minister of Magic! I am the authority in this nation! I made these laws, I got them voted in session, and now they'll be applied! You've fired, Bones! From your job and from the aurors! Women have no place in such jobs! You should be so lucky to walk out with your wand and life intact, instead of heading to the Diagon Plaza for a public thrashing under an energy whip! And you, Marchbanks! You decrepit, obsolete old crone! How dare you challenge my authority inside my chamber of parliament! I am Minister of Magic! You will obey me, in the immediateness of the moment, or be broken by the aurors until you know your place in life!"

Harry shouted over the Minister's rant "Don't listen to his foul lies! He's trying to bullshit you into giving up your positions and badges willingly because he can't magically compel you, since Marchbanks activated the wards on full! Any attempt to seize our titles, ranks, styles, sigil rings or badges of office will be seen by the wards as committing High Crimes, Sedition and Treason, and be punished immediately by The Old Ways, without a trial. The only chance the conspirators have to win their putsch is if we're stupid, or scared enough, to give into the lies they spew! They have no power at all! That's why they held a secret, low-attendance meeting on Halloween night, a family ritual night! To bypass not only the protocols & procedures, but also the chamber wards and their blood-oaths that were tightened after the Dumbledore debacle was aired out. As long as we hold fast our stations in Nature, Magyck and Society, they can't touch us without destroying themselves and their allies! They'll be the squibs in the end, not us!"

Barty Crouch Snarled in unfettered anger at the child's poisonous voice that was undoing all the careful word-smithing he had Fudge's cronies put in the law bill that would have killed-off this little maggot's attempts to rebuild Magical England in depth. No longer seeing straight, the elderly man subconsciously decided to go out in a blaze of magical glory as he raised his wand at the boy's face, incanting 'Avada Kedavra!' with seething bile that any confirmed Death Eater would have felt kinship for. A tight powerful beam of green energy ran from the wand towards the child who dropped his hatchet to let it dangle from his wrist by the lanyard as the hand moved to point-cast, silently and without foci, the childish spell 'Hole' to create a five foot wide disk of blackness that hung in the air in front of him, while a matching 'Hole' appeared automatically 5 feet to his right side. The killing curse from Crouch's wand went in a straight line, as it always did, entering the sudden dimensional aperture to do a 'U' turn in the Ether before disgorging from the paired 'Hole', going straight at Barty's own startled form.

Bartemius Crouch, Head of House, reigning Lord Crouch, dropped dead in his chair, without a sound or defensive move, killed by his own Avada in front of dozens of witnesses and the press who had recorded the acts as they happened.

Cornelius Fudge was scared so hard by the twin green flashes that occurred right besides him that he vomited, pissed and shat himself in the same second, then dropped unconscious on the floor, laying in his own stinking mess until he was picked up for transport to the cells.

Walden MacNair jumped from his chair, throwing a quick dagger towards the insolent child that had just killed their best chance to take over the country without an army of rabid fanatics and dumb, subhuman brutes like Fenrir Greyback and his he-bitches. The Death Eater wanted to have the Power his dead master, Lord Voldemort, had promised and Crouch's discrete paperwork approach had been promising. By the laws of the land, if they declared an emergency session and passed bills under quorum, the rest of the Warlocks had only 30 days to question or contest the laws for a full debate and regular vote with quorum in place. The strategy had been to make the laws, vote them silently, wait for thirty days without saying anything to anybody, then surprise the fucking little cunt-dropping with a team of aurors backed by Unspeakable Bode, a hidden sympathizer of their group. But then somebody couldn't keep the building sealed right, and everything went down the loo at championship casting speed.

Harry saw the six inch dagger coming at his chest and used a body booster from Warrior Law to quick-move backwards by four full yards, again scaring people by casting without any sounds or foci visible. He didn't have the chance to take a shot with either pistol or spell as MacNair's knife was stored in an invisible wrist sheath that also had a conditional portkey that triggered when the knife was out for more than one full second. The Death Eater disappeared before Madam Marchbanks could activate the chamber's siege wards to blockade magical transports.

With a scream of rage, Madam Bones turned towards the seated Warlocks, wand aloft in case some fool male tried to hit her in the back, but all the elderly men were sitting in stunned fear, the fullness of the misconceived, utterly feeble plan dawning on them now. They had been hoodwinked by honeyed words about easy Power and cost-less victory, with all the burdens and hardships being borne by the child who defiled the purity of their blood and community.

All lies.

Madam Marchbanks had never been temporarily suspended, so the bill didn't pass legally.

Madam Bones had never been legally fired, so the young buck that replaced her was a sham.

Minister Fudge said he was in charge, but it was Crouch that managed everything, with Fudge just along for the ride because he too wanted easy Power without efforts or costs to himself.

And MacNair wasn't just a friendly supporter of traditional Pureblood patriarchal authority, as he had purported, but a hardened killer and genuine Death Eater that had escaped prison by claiming to have been Imperiused by Voldemort to obey him. It was only now, after their bitter defeat at the hands of the true masters of the Wizengamot, that the geriatric traitors realized just how thoroughly they had been played like patsies, just like during the Blood Purity War.

Under the orders of Madam Marchbanks, the group of loyal Ladies, Lords and Proxies began to recover the wands of the traitors, searching them for foci, weapons, portkeys and potential suicide devices. Noisily, two full squads of aurors in red battle robes arrived in the chamber to assist in the arrests, doing scans and revelation dweomers to find any who might have hidden, or invisible devices that could go off and hurt people.

That was how they detected a small insect trying to fly out of the open doors, but had an animagus signature. The common shit-fly was the treasonous Unspeakable Bole! The aurors fired stunning and paralysis spells, until one woman who was more alert than the rest shot an explosive pellet that spread outwards hundreds of thin filaments of sticky glue. The human as a shit-fly was hit in the torso and wing, getting stuck beyond his insect body's capacity to get free. He reverted to human, the ward glyphs embroidered in his robes unglueing him and deflecting the stunners just enough for his Unspeakable portkey to transport him through then open doors. He appeared in a secret safe-house under sorcerous Fidelius that had been decommissioned following the Blood Purity War, a decade ago. Operating solely on mundane means from now on, the traitor would remain at large for a long time to come, fomenting anarchy and sedition amongst wizarding white males wherever he went.

{ HP } --- { Another wrecked Yule break } --- { HP }

Whelp, it was official; the Wheel of Days had turned a full lunar year, and things had ended about the same as they had begun going down hill at the last Yuletide. Back then, Dumbledore's perfidies were exposed to the wide open public, precipitating the Fall of the Manipulator and his puppetized theocracy of his own effigy. The intermezzo had been all about bureaucracy trying to plod along the road that wasn't supposed to be taken, grading the land, setting rails and raising signals posts as they advanced, just like the pioneers of the railways had done before them. And now, another bevvy of treasons, investigations, public denunciations or allegations of the crassest level, with yet more societal upgrades and renovations ahead.

And Dumbledore's investigations, trials and sentencings weren't even half done!

It was taking King Ragnok Backsnapper several miracles of patience and tolerance every week to keep upholding his given pledge that all the nations, governments, churches, guilds and chartered or titled families that had suffered from Dumbledore's crimes would get a chance to interrogate the bastard to get answers to mysteries that have gone on for a century or more. As it was, the goblins estimated prudently that another two years would be needed to fulfill the decree of their king, and their obligations under British, ICW and UN laws.

Two more fucking years before Justice met with Albus too-many-titles Dumbledore.

At the very least, the Goblin Nation was over 97% done with him already, and the British were strenuously nearing the 66% bar but had stalled due to all the seditious and treasonous activities that had happened in the country. The process was starting up again, but slowly. The ICW's other member states were mostly at 80%+ finished, with a few details remaining. It was the chartered and titled families of nine different countries that were the real problem. The families had been ordered by exaltation, Peerage, titles, ranks, styles, positions and closeness to the monarchs or governments in place. That meant that Harry's Peverell and Potter files had been processed amongst the first, especially as they had been the linchpin that made Albus fall from his pedestal. When Harry inherited the House of Black in October, it destroyed all of the magical and not-so-legal blockades put in the way, and also swept away all the diplomatic posturing that had been maintained by Bartemius Crouch to help his ally.

And wasn't that another bloody kick in the fucking teeth!

Bartemius Crouch Senior had died a traitor to Britain, so the Old Laws of Magical Britannia still applied. It automatically gave the DMLE and aurors an unfettered right to search & seize ANY and ALL things in his bank vaults in Magical or Mundane Britain, in his estates or businesses. No lawyer – client privilege applied anymore, so his notary, solicitor and barrister could be questioned and searched too.

The aurors who knocked down his manor door were greeted by a wailing, sobbing female house-elf who was incredibly grateful to see the red robes inside the property. She had been barred by her master from ever contacting any human or goblin outside the estate without Bartemius Senior's prior and constrictive orders. She took the aurors down to the official basement, then down to the hidden second sub-level, to show them yet another treason done by the elder Crouch.

His only son, who had been cast out of the Family's Blood-Law by magic, was imprisoned inside a very well crafted wrought iron cage with two inch thick bars. The cage dated back to when having muggle slaves for all sorts of reasons, or dark creatures like lycans or vampires, wasn't even something that you had to hide or pay a permit for. Back in the 1300's and 1400's even, all sorts of experimentations, spell practice, sacrificial rituals, household slavery, sexual perversions and such could be done on muggles or other non-wizard entities without shame or fear. So the cage was strong, built by professional architects and magical blacksmiths who had engraved scriptworkes to cancel Channeling, Essence, Mentalism, Primal Essaence, Psionics, animagus transformations and most forms of naturally produced venoms from happening inside. The cell was actually more like a small hall, with six separate two-bed cells at the back and a plethora of ancient torture devices covering the middle half of the common space. The two quarters of the common area on the left and right were long workbenches with floating shelves over them to hold the diverse handheld tools, weapons, or varied experimental devices being tested on slaves.

It was in cell number one, at the far left, that they found the young man, bound to his bed by a heavy iron chain just long enough for him to reach the stone bench that was the completely exposed privy and the sink besides it, also a block of carved stone. The beds were iron frames covered with a thick layer of straw but now sheets or pillows. The inmates had to burrow into the straw to stay warm as there were no fires or heat sources in this part of the floor. The only times a fire was made, it was in the massive monumental hearth to heat branding irons or similar items of pain and misery, or to cremate a dead slave to avoid contamination or discovery.

Seven years ago, young Bartemius Crouch Junior had been illegally removed from Azkaban prison by his father, despite that he was a publicly avowed Death Eater who had taken part in the raid on the Longbottom estate. He was caught at the site, injured badly enough to incapacitate, and brought in for trial and processing. He stayed in jail for three years, before his father had obeyed his dying wife's last wish, imposed upon him via a magical vow. Barty Senior gave his wife Polyjuice Potion to look like her son, while he Imperiused the young adult, barely 24 years old, to drink the same to look like his mother. The Dementors can't recognize the original from a fake, no matter the Ministry's propaganda, something Barty Senior knew full well. So he did the switch and his wife's already taxed body gave out before the potion had run its hour. He called the auror guards, declared the boy dead from dementor exposure, as dozens do each year, and left with Barty Junior posing as his bereaved wife who just lost her only son.

Once back at the family manor, Bartemius Senior had wasted no time in chucking his felonious son in the second basement where he inflicted seven years of misery on him, as he truly believed that he should suffer like the terrorist and traitor he was. The public could have swallowed that part with efforts, but they could have. But Barty Sr was by that point a mite cracked in the kettle, as the saying goes. He decided that since his son had cost him his wife's happiness and life, then it was the young man's job to replace her in his life. Not up in the manor, despite the Imperius being applied every week like clockwork, but in his bed. On the extra-large wooden wrack that had been upholstered and enchanted with permanent cushioning charms, centuries ago by an old Lord Crouch who liked his sex toys to be awake and responsive but unable to resist without having to drug them out of their wits. It wasn't fun if they didn't know what was happening, and why he was imposing such violations upon them. Bartemius Senior felt the same way about his son, and since he had in fact cast him out by magic, he didn't see him as his son anymore, and not really as a human either, to be honest. Then again, Senior wasn't fully sane by then, so...

And that was what the aurors had to deal with, and make a report of to the DMLE and Gamot when they brought the delirious, partially handicapped young man to St-Mungo's for treatment against chronic pains and spams from Cruciatus exposure, and severe mental illness due to serial mind-rapes via diverse spells and potions. That was yet another scandal to rock the establishment and destroy a bit more the already shredded reputation of the supposed 'Pure'-bloodlines of Britain.

The thirteen conspirators that followed Fudge and Crouch having been stupid enough to try their putsch inside the official amphitheater of the Wizengamot meant that the ancient Royal Wards had automatically sent urgent messages to the Queen's Archmage. He in turn alerted the armies and government of a state of open insurrection inside one of Her Majesty's territories, specifically the Homeland, in London proper.

The result was that the surviving conspirators of that Halloween night were forcibly seized by the Royal War-Wizards, to be judged and condemned by Her Britannic Majesty in person. All of them were immediately taken to The Tower of London for detention and trial, and it is where they met their inhumane end. Each conspirator was interrogated with human Veritaserum and the Goblin version that causes great pain to those who lie or refuse to answer. Upon full confessions that opened many more investigations into other people and organizations, they were given potions to nourish their bodies and keep them awake to endure the many punishments to come, spaced over several days.

Each traitor to the Crown and Throne was branded with the Traitor's Sigil using scalding-red irons on their forehead, hands, feet and torso. They were flogged on bare back with a barbed scourge, dipped in boiling salted vinegar between blows, until no more skin remained between the nape and waistline. To prevent them from lying ever again, their tongues and teeth were pulled out with pliers, and their vocal chords were severed with a small scalpel through a hole in the side of the throat. To make certain their lies were not propagated by written texts, their hands were crushed with iron war-hammers. Then they were put to the wrack until their long limbs had dislocated and broken, but their pelvis and spine were protected to endure the rest. Once properly crippled, they were slowly hung by iron hooks in their shoulders, elbows and wrists to keep them aloft in a floating cross shape. At that point, their stomach was opened with a fishmonger's knife and they were gutted with the old disemboweling crank-winch. When their abdomen was empty and only then, even if they died before, were they made to kneel before the block to be beheaded with a crude, heavy iron war-ax, their head mounted to an iron spike on the tower battlements.

Upon death, each traitor was further punished by having the judgment of their chosen God denied as the Queen's Archmage stood by to intercept their soul, converting them into Lorne spheres, the money of the Outer Planes and Divine Temples. Each fool would forever end evermore be refused forgiveness as they were passed from hand to hand across aeons untold, being nothing more than spare change for Entities of Powers Unspeakable by mere mortals.

The entire process of execution was recorded in mundane and magical methods, then consigned to the British Realm's secret archives of the Royal Throne so that it never be forgotten what the dangers, and the price, of being Anointed Monarch means. The Wizengamot archives received fully notarized copies of each recording, and the full assembly was made to view them, as soon as all the heredity rituals had been finished and all seats that could be filled were. That meant that 11 year old Harry Potter and Hermione Dagworth-Granger saw the unfiltered truth of what it costs to be in Power, to maintain that Power, and also what happens to those that try and fail in the race to usurp or conquer Power from others.

The two kids weren't the only ones to need therapy after that, and Hermione got a lot less strident about Harry's bad habits with alcohol or recreational herbs. She even thanked him quite honestly when he offered her an antique nargileh that he had found for her in Hedgerow Terrace. Then again, Neville had just gifted the tight-knit group with dubious herbs aplenty and Draco had distilled some great tasting wine over the year, so everybody was happy that February, for a change.

{ HP } --- { End of Hogwarts year I, at last } --- { HP }

Thanking Hades Profusely and repeatedly, Harry Potter watched his house-elf Jippsy as she did one last run around the Lord's suite to recover every last bit of property and sanitize all traces or effluves from her Lord and his kin. It wouldn't do for the bad Ministry men to have physical parts of her Master in their hands. They would use all sorts of evil mojoju and idols to remotely force the boy into felonies and treasons to destroy his reputation or steal his heritages.

Harry cracked his back and neck, silently glad he had relented, a year ago, and bonded with Jippsy to handle his household affairs in the trunk and suite. His schedule over the year had been a horrendous montage that left him barely a few hours here or there to relax and purge his mind. With the constant crimes, depravities and treasons strolling out of the Wizengamot chamber like a New Year's parade at each new moon of each month, things had gotten dicey right quick.

And now the muggle Queen was involved, up to her eyeballs in it, too.

Man, had that gotten stuck in people's craw, what she did to those thirteen traitors! All the old Pureblood Lords were a-twitter with worries and bile, claiming into empty air that the Crown had betrayed Wizarding Britain and that they MUST rise up to recover their wand-rights and manly Powers before Mystra. Strangely enough, that handful of geriatric fools had bitched and whined in public for a good month before they suddenly disappeared and Gringotts processed their successions promptly. Nobody was ever told what actually happened to them, but their heads now lined the battlements of The Tower of London, right next to Fudge and his other fools.

The Welsh Wiccan sect was in full self-despise and self-mortification mode, trying to find someone to blame, and some sort of savior that would rebuild their sense of worth as humans, and superiority as wizarding men who stood above all inferior species and primitive magicks. Yes, there were several articles written in the Daily Prophet exactly in that tone of voice, with that choice of words. Demagoguery, populism, theocratism and messianic rhetoric were in full swing as the higher nobles, bourgeois merchants, middle class professionals and low-class plebes all asked the same questions at the same time. The human population of Magical Britain was sinking in a torment of despair, led down the whirlpool by geriatric old crones who still thought that white men were better than everything else under the sun, moon and stars. They spoke, prayed and harangued the crowds as if the epoch of England's christian missionaries conquering the planet back in the 1700's had never ended, just paused for a little while.

And the stupid, delirious and desperate crowds wanted to hear more.

The thronging horde of plebes wanted a damned savior, like Dumbledore had promised them.

Five dozen fake Seers had been convicted to varying sentences in Azkaban for trying to promote false prophecies or oracular pronouncements, the same way that Sybill Trelawney had done, and the criminals were targeting the exact same demographics for patsies, thus the situation explained before. The DMLE had its hands full with trying to corral the fake preachers of doomsday and their agitated followers out of the public roads and plazas. Aurors had to intervene a few times, especially when a mentally ill squib vagrant claimed to have learned the arts of the Haruspex from a traveling Fae priestess. The defective retard managed to emotion and harangue the crowd of deluded old crones he was preaching at so much that they obeyed his command to bring him a young mother, so that he could cut her belly open to extract the child to perform an augury on it. The miserably confounded old men, agog with belief and envy for such a are Gift of the Celestials bestowed upon such a simpleton, made quick work of forcibly procuring a pregnant girl for him. The felon had soon ripped the girl's abdomen open and brought out the baby girl, butchering her under the pretense of seeing the future inside her bowels and organs. The aurors arrived too late to save the young girl or her daughter, but they didn't let a single perpetrator escape, bringing in some 19 geriatric men who swore by their superstitions, four elderly women of the same mindset, and the very clearly mentally ill squib who was laughing as if he were on potions in preparation for a surgery. All 24 people were investigated and condemned by the Wizengamot to the Dementors' Kiss within one week of arrest.

And that wasn't all the criminality that happened.

Harry's Peverell properties were nonexistent since the House had been in stasis for so long that everything had been sold off or destroyed centuries ago. All that was left were the books, artifacts and monies in the vault under Gringotts, so that was safe. The Potter properties had been undergoing renovations to shore-up their value and get better kinds of tenants with less problems when a slew of attacks struck nearly half of the rental spaces, all motivated by envy, bigotry against his age, and superstitions fanned by old crones in search of a messiah or sacrificial goat. The Black properties were in worse shape since Sirius had never followed the advice of his account managers, preferring to spend the money on his vices to numb his ill mind. The foul mingrel had acted like a slum lord, letting good buildings fall into decrepitude so that they were only used as whorehouses, drug dens or worse. Despite saying that Remus Lupin was such a competent, over-educated man, and trying to push him unto Harry as Steward or Regent, Sirius had never formally hired him for anything, thus letting his own personal affairs slide into a quagmire over the decade since he had left Azkaban damaged. And then practically all of the already not-so-good Black rental properties were attacked by an organized gang of vandals throwing canisters of raw Promethium oil to sap the wards as the buildings burned. Thankfully, most edifices had two layers of wards and several had added muggle water sprinklers in the last thirty years, so only a handful were totally lost, but a dozen would need to be gutted and rebuilt.

Harry descended into an unholy fury so bad that he summoned some of the less dangerous creatures that he normally dealt with to see if one of them could track the bastards to their hideout or homes. He promptly got several names and addresses that the aurors then investigated at high speed, to corral this intolerable rioting and serial demolition of living spaces and shops. They managed to capture three young adults in their late twenties, but four others had managed to flee the country entirely. It averred that all seven men were a cabal formed by the grand-children of several of those geriatric felons that had been arrested and executed since last Samhain, following the Halloween 1991 attempted putsch by Fudge and Crouch. The men had simply used the ongoing civil unrest and attacks by superstitious fools to enact their vengeance against Harry, in the vain effort of getting away Scott-free. Instead, three were captured, the names of the four others were known, and the Dementors' Kiss would be their reward to all of them, as they got caught.

Looking in the mirror of his suite, Harry snarked mentally that he may be a devoted follower of Hades, God of death, but the body-count piling up at his doorstep was getting exaggerated. If it continued, Jippsy would start wondering if she had enough Power to blink through the dense mass of corpses whenever she had to leave the house for errands or leisure. Metaphorically speaking, of course! He wasn't so uncouth as to let bodies pile on the porch when he had a perfectly good (neutral, really) Tenebrous Pioneer to dig him a graveyard in the rear garden.

The ride back to London and 'civilization' was rather bland, all things considered. Happily, nobody was stupid enough to bully anybody this time, the message having been painfully received a year ago. The sight of all six girls and one boy being thrashed in front of the great hall just before dinner, counting as a school event demanding mandatory presence of all students and faculty, had left none of the castle residents unchanged. The good part was that bullying had been dramatically reduced. The bad part was that those who did continue bullying did so with the firm intent of leaving as many gravely injured victims as they could before being expelled. But, it still did the job, as inter-student violence or harassment had dropped to a fraction of what it was under Dumbledore's rules. Even those dunderhead 14 year old Weasley Twins had learned their place after just one tag-team punishment at the very beginning of September, then been silent and unseen, giving an impression of cooperativeness all year.

So, Harry and Rehz were able to freely enjoy the train ride with the same five people as the trip going up to Scotland; Susan Bones, Neville Longbottom, Draco Malfoy, Nymphadora Tonks, and Hermione Dagworth-Granger.

Susan was expecting to be alone and lonely a lot this summer since her aunt was working overtime at the Ministry building due to all the investigations that just kept piling up, on top of all the crud from Dumbledore & Crouch that hadn't finished being processed in front of the Goblin courts and ICW members. The fallout from Fudge and part of the Ministry being judged traitorous to England and forcing the Queen to get involved was another kettle of fish that would be monopolizing the time of the seated Warlocks this summer too.

Neville had planned a slow but productive season in his greenhouses or visiting Hedgerow Terrace, to try and find himself a druid conclave, or even a witch coven. He wasn't picky and would probably accept an invite from the Green Sisterhood if they talked to him honestly. It didn't take long for the boy to reveal that hi grand-mother was born a 'Rosier' and her late sister had married Saul Croaker, the man who became Head of the Unspeakables. While Saul was usually too busy to visit and wasn't really much of a bother, his older brother Algernon Croaker, Head of House and Lord Croaker, was a right bastard who had always pined after Augusta since they had met in Hogwarts, over fifty years ago. He had taken her marriage to Lord Longbottom very badly, and tried twice to drum-up spurious fake charges of having committed Anathema acts to try and get rid of her husband. He failed both times, getting kicked out of the Ministry for it and losing the Croaker seat in the process, which was then sold by the Bagnold administration at public auction, going to a newblood witch. Algernon never forgave the Longbottoms for these crimes, even though they were his own, and it is rumored that he actively helped to kill Augusta's husband to get her on the rebound. He was also thought to have paid Bartemius Crouch Jr to ask Voldemort to target the Longbottom males to End the Line, so he could get Augusta clear and free for himself. The problem was that for all these rumors, and big signs they weren't far-fetched, the rabid old gribbitch Augusta had never barred either men access to Longbottom manor, even when they hit or cursed her last living descendant.

Harry promised to look into it with Amelia Bones, sometime soon. He also invited Neville to come live with him over the summer, if he needed a safe refuge.

Draco was looking forward to being home because his parents had decided to let him build his own small laboratory in one of the older tool sheds in the estate gardens. He would be allowed to start distilling, fermenting and brewing basic things to get some practice, to develop his taste buds and nose as primary tools of his future trade. He would also get in some flying on his broom, since he hadn't been able to have one at Hogwarts this year. That old Dumbledorian rule hadn't yet been changed, but was due for revision next year.

Nymphadora glared at Harry hen he used her full name unpunished, because he's the Lord Black and he scared the bejeezus out of her. She'd seen the security recording of his intercepting & sending back Crouch's Avada, killing the cruel man in a cold second. With that under his belt, the boy was already heads & shoulders above her in combat practice, despite that she was getting fast tracked into the auror cadets without an extra preparatory year as had been the custom for several decades, due to Hogwarts' defense curriculum being unstable and diluted like rat piss. Her summer would be spent with her girlfriends in Diagon District, enjoying a small bit of her hard-earned freedom now that she was a legal adult. She would go to sleep-overs at her friends' places a few times. Come September, she'd be neck deep in auror boot-camp, so she wanted to enjoy herself first.

Hermione was uncertain about everything. Her parents had of course been informed about the family's past genealogy and honorable service to the Crown and Nation on the magical side of Britain. But that meant they were also aware of her status as the new Lady of the House, and officially emancipated by the Will of Magyck. She didn't have to live with them or follow their rules anymore, if she wanted out. Furthermore, she now had the money and properties to live on her own with the finances to pay her own staffers. With the way her parents gauged success and maturity, there was a good chance that they would in fact say "Well done! Good showing! Now, when are you moving out to concentrate on your chosen career?" The good side about professional parents was that she had a lot of freedom. The bad side was that there was precious little emotional attachment between them to hold the family together under these circumstances.

Harry, Susan and Nymphadora immediately offered her a place to stay until her affairs were settled enough to be safe and comfortable in her new home. Draco offered her politely to ask his mother to assist her, as a boy and girl of their ages, alone and out of view, could create a scandal that would fuel the already blazing social unrest of the plebes. Neville agreed with Draco, adding that his grand-mother tolerates his existence barely, she wouldn't accept any friend of his.

The young girl understood their situations and thanked them each, touched by their effort to help.

The House of Black goes Dark

(Harry Potter - theme)

July 1992  
12 Grimmauld Place  
London, England

Harry walked slowly through the mundane side of the vast train station at King's Cross, taking the time to breathe in the air of civilization and modernity. Hermione walked besides him, looking around fretfully as she tried to find either her parents or one of the valets from their home. She didn't see her name raised above the heads of the crowd gathered at the waiting area, like so many people did to guide their loved ones to them. Biting her lower lip in anxiety, the 12 year old girl scanned the crowd fearfully until Harry whispered to her "You are emancipated and the Lady of House, you can use a 'Point Me' or 'Blood Compass' to find them. The laws for underage sorcery no longer apply to you. Take a breath and feed magic to the earrings I gave you at Yule, they will show you the way."

Hermione did as he suggested, casting the Blood Compass first, then the Point Me to a servant of my parents when she did find her family in the station. The pull from the small foci dangling from her ears brought her to a young man, barely twenty years old, caucasian white, with green eyes and brown hair cut in a prudent style. He was dressed in black trousers, a white button shirt and blue waistcoat with a briefcase in hand. He didn't look aggressive or angry to have waited for the person he was meeting. As Hermione and Harry came near him, he seemed to recognize the young woman as he gave a formal bow from the neck towards her.

"Madam Dagworth-Granger? I'm Roland Xavier Holtzberth. I was sent by your parents." He spoke in a slight rural accent from the Midlands. He put the briefcase on a visitor's bench to open it and take out a thin folder, which he handed to Hermione.

The girl read through the file with her right eyebrow raising on its own the further she got into the papers. After passing through the two dozen sheets at high speed, she closed the file and gave it back, looking the young male from feet to head intently. Putting on her Wizengamot face, she asked for clarification "So, my parents reacted to the situation by hiring you to be my personal secretary to cover for me when I'm at school? And you'll be my driver when I walk the Mundane Side of the world?"

Nodding happily, the young man replied "Yes ma'am! I'm what the Welsh Wiccan call a 'muggle in the know' because my parents were both squibs who descended from other squibs. So, I went to a special school that has half-magic and half-muggle courses. I can't use an external focus like a wand or ring unless it was crafted with stored charges or permanent charms. I can however read, count, write and speak a half dozen magical languages, engrave scriptworkes correctly and I've been told I'm a deft hand with tools in either a workshop, garden or apothecary. My entire personal file is at your parents' house, with my school reports and the commendation from my last employer. He was the only one I worked for to date, after ending high school."

Hermione blinked both eyes once at the information, asking for clarification "Did you leave the other posting because you wanted better conditions, or a higher profile employer? Or were you no loner satisfied of the situation? It can't have been a bad thing since they gave you a formal letter to recommend you."

Smiling sadly, Roland shook his head with a distant look in his eyes as he replied "No, it wasn't bad, just time to move on. My first boss was a good woman who hired me right out of school for pretty much the same job. She was a witch with the Green Sisterhood, born into the sect nearly two centuries ago. She died three months ago, in late April at the age of 197. Spry old gal, she was! And a temper gentle like a brook in spring. But she told me when she hired me that her time was nigh. She felt Mother Gaia calling her. She passed at peace in her sleep. T'was a quiet funeral with only other sisters present. She had no family left to mourn her, not at that age. So, she wrote the letter around Valentine's Day, telling me she would be around to bother me much anymore. She's the one who did the divination to find my next job. I only sent the one letter to your parents, before they even thought of putting an ad somewhere to find you the extra help. I reckon I scared the living lights out of both with that bit. Still, they met with my Boss about a week before she died, and that was the deal done. I started moving my stuff and working at their house in mid-May, after the funeral and will reading. Been there since."

Harry looked at the forlorn young man, softly praying to Hades in his mind for Sight and Truth, to be certain this wasn't a trap to kidnap or hurt Hermione. The spell returned a wave of positive and protective feelings, telling all would be right for his friend. He took hold of her hand to give it a light, supportive squeeze as signal to go with it.

Hermione took strength form her friend, asking "Have my parents decided that should live apart or do I still have a room over there? I haven't had time to visit any of the properties I inheritied yet, and I need to find new house-elves since the old ones died much after the House was put in stasis. My ancestor Hector died three hundred years ago and I'm the only fully magical descendant since., so everything has to be reactivated, cleaned and stocked to be livable."

Nodding as he gestured towards the station's passenger exit, Roland responded easily "I gotta say your parents looked mighty pleased by the news about your inheritance. And their ancestry too, by what I saw of them. They haven't said a word of putting you out, but you shouldn't expect them home any more than usual, if you tag me meaning..."

"Ha," Hermione replied in understanding. She had brought reputation, honor and money to the family, but that was simply their expectations from her, regardless of magic, gender or age. As long as she behaved as fitted the rank and appearances of the household amongst their professional associates, they wouldn't feel the need to be present to mitigate her bad manners. It was nothing more or less than regular service inside the Granger home.

Smiling sadly at Harry, the young girl whispered "Maybe I'll be looking at the old manor sooner than later, then. I don't plan to live somewhere that I feel like an uncouth guest that overstayed their welcome at distant relatives' place instead of getting a hotel room. Plus, as soon as I get at least one elf, most of the mess will sort itself out... like magic..." she finished lamely in a poor attempt to lighten her own mood from the depression that was threatening.

Nodding, Harry escorted her to the old car that had been borrowed from the Granger's garage for the day, waving the two goodbye as the rolled away. The boy cast a discrete tracking charm on the car's rear bumper to find it on the country's map, later in the day. He would go and pay a silent visit to insure everything was going well, or at least peacefully in her family's house.

{ HP } --- { Home, sweet poisonous home } --- { HP }

Harry walked from King's Cross to as small alley where he could be hidden from the pedestrians and cars on the street. He slowly walked some twenty minutes northward, over to the location of his new home, at the rather shabby looking #12 Grimmauld Place, Borough of Islington, London, in a Muggle neighborhood that hid the decrepit wizarding house. It had been called Black Manor in some past life, but never truly deserved such an appellation. It was a townhouse built over two basements and four storeys plus attic in the style common in the 1800's all over the British colonies and influenced countries. The thing's floor plan was a nightmare to understand, especially when you took in the bevy of permanent space expansion charms to create secret passages and rooms.

Still, it was -a- home and much better than paying for a small room in a backwater country inn, just to store his trunk in peace, as that was his true home and pretty much the only one he needed to be happy. For now anyways. Sighing loudly in true pre-adolescent fashion, Harry shoved his hands in his pants pockets as he stood in the miserably maintained, decrepit public park that was supposed to bring greenery and happiness to the small circular enclave. Instead, it gave a feel vaguely reminiscent of a funeral urn filled with faded, wilted flowers that stunk of decay. Looking over at the dreary, weathered façade of Grimmauld Place, the boy couldn't help the sarcastic thought thought that at least the buildings and park matched together harmoniously.

Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Harry crossed the narrow avenue to climb up the small stairs up to the front door, noticing the pair of small, ugly stone flower beds on each side of the masonry stairs and banisters. Those would need clearing out and replanting with things that would be able to endure London's climate without too much maintenance. Either an elf or the Pioneer could do that quickly enough. Sighing again as he noticed the large bronze door knocker in the shape of a basilisk head, he grumbled nastily about the Black ancestors in Parseltongue as he fished the overly decorative cast iron key from the man-purse at his belt. It was a useful little thing given to him by Neville at Yule, and practical fro storing things that didn't fit in pockets but were too small to need a briefcase or rucksack.

As he was about to slot the key, the bronze basilisk blinked its genuine emerald eyes, asking in a sibilant voice "Who daressss enter the den of the sssserpent kingssss? Tell me or I will bite you! You will ssssufffffer from my venom mosssst horrrribly!"

Whelp, that was it. The Black Family were cliché Darkness followers barely fit for a cable movie. On a Wednesday night after the eleven o'clock news. And the infomercials.

Using his most noble, and snobby, Parseltongue accent, Harry replied that he was the Head of House, the Lord Black, regent Duke of the Zezetshire Cairnhills in the English Midlands. He presented his Sigil rings to the animated guardian, offering his three Houses for inspection.

The metal basilisk coiled itself vigorously in deep pride at belonging to such a powerful master that had so many nest under his fangs. The construct's feelings swelled even worse when Rehz Ib Fettach appeared on the boy's shoulder, glaring at the impudent door ornament for barring the march of his Master into his new home. All gleeful with hope and venomous thoughts of glory and almight, the basilisk tasted the child's soul-aura to confirm, then immediately triggered the door to open without needing the key. It bowed as low as its position on the panel allowed it to as Harry walked by, giving him a feeling of murderous malevolence as he passed in front of its glowing green eyes.

The moment he was fully inside the vestibule, the door slammed behind him and the antique gas lamps mounted to sconces on the walls came alight, giving off a lugubrious glow that lit barely anything except dust, cobwebs, and furniture covered by dusty green sheets. Harry cleared his throat and called out "Jippsy! I have need of you."

The elf popped into being next to her master, looking around the new home with a mixture of growing horror at the dilapidated condition, but also tremulous joy at all the work and cleaning that she would be doing in the coming weeks. Truly Jippsy's master was kind to her, giving her such a monumental task to accomplish!

An obnoxiously loud pop was heard in the foyer just passed the inner door, declaring the arrival of another elf. He was male, very old, wrinkled and more brown than green, showing clearly he was in ill health after years of neglect and abuse. Seeing the boy with the Faerie Drake on his shoulder, the elf bowed until his nose touched the dirty, moth-eaten carpet, standing back up with a stern but not aggressive expression on his face. "I bees Kreacher, elf of the Black Manor for London. I bees in charge of this household. Are yous the new master Black?"

Harry answered by showing all his rings and calling notarized copies the official Heritage Blood-Tithe Rituals he had done at Gringotts to assume all titles, ranks, styles and positions correctly. The elf read the thin folio quickly, handing it back with a shallow bow. He gestured the boy towards the inside of the house and up the stairs until the first landing, where a wizarding portrait of the last Lady of the House, Walburga Black. The elf announced politely "Mistress! Here bees the new Lord Black. He comes to take House in hand. He has the goblin papers, too. He bees the Lord of Potter and Peverell, too. And door-snake says he sssspeakssss!"

The decrepit, disheveled and sickly woman in the portrait animated, leaning forward against the lower part of the frame like a windowsill, thus showing the long, broken, nails that emerged from crooked fingers. Her hands and face were stained with liver spots and deep purple bags hung under her eyes. When she attempted a feeble smile, it only served to open the seeping cracks in her lips and display her rotting, blackened teeth. Harry nodded and tried to smile, wincing in sympathy for the old woman, wondering how long she could have suffered like this, that her magical portrait ended reflecting this awful image after her death?

"Yes, child. I know. I look frightful, and my temper is actually worse, on most days. Poor Kreacher had to suffer it long enough to attest. It was a cursed illnesses inflicted upon my body that ended rotting my brain, thus affecting my mind in the end. I died in 1985, alone and isolated except for loyal, worthy Kreacher who was by my side at my Passing. Sirius was out of England due to Dumbledore's machination, but he wouldn't have come to me even if he could have done so safely. I had not been a good mother, not even an acceptable one. And Orion was my cousin to the second degree by birth before he was my husband. I never knew how Sirius and Regulus got to be so healthy and stable, given how inbred and sickly our whole Family was."

Harry nodded, in sad admission to her words. "Yes, grand-mother by adoption. I knew this when I accepted the 'Blood Compact' inside my soul. There is a deep sickness buried in the bosom of the Black Lineage, dating back far behind us by several centuries. I don't know if we can even find the original sin or guilty person anymore. Professional diviners and Seers would be hard pressed to find anything accurate, let alone actionable. All we can do anymore is try to repair the damages and clean the Family enough to prevent further degradation for future generations."

Walburga's image gazed upon her only grand-child, the result of Sirius giving the Blood-Oath of god-fatherhood and granting Harry three drops of blood during the ritual. The boy already had native Black blood from James' mother Dorea Black, but this Tithe confirmed his primacy in the heritage list. Since there were doubts about Lucius and Narcissa, poor Bellatrix was insane beyond even Family standards without any known children, and Andromeda was disinherited legally but not by magic, the burden of Lordship fell to Sirius, and now his godson.

"Tell me truthfully, child, how did my oldest son die? What was the cause?"

Harry closed his eyes, the old pain of abandonment and betrayal coming to the surface, but he took hold of it, strangled it and put it back in its coffin, in the crypt at the back of his soul. Opening his emerald green eyes, he locked gaze with the animate image and told her the raw, unvarnished truth of why and how her oldest child by birth had died in shame and pain.

Closing her eyes in pain as if she were really a living being, the image of Walburga Black seemed to be grieving for her lost child, judged by Magyck. Bowing low in her frame, she declared "I may be insane by birth and by curse, but you have my loyalty and that of the remaining House, my Lord Black. Thy will be done, in society, magick and Nature. Id mote est."

Nodding in acceptance, Harry turned to Kreacher who had watched, listened and learned the Power and strength of mind of his new Lord. He may be just 12 years old, but he was a true Lord in spirit, mind, skills and determination to be the only master of his life and destiny, except for the divinities he had chosen as patrons and guides. The elf bowed low, then stood at attention as much as his sickly, elderly boy allowed him.

Harry declared in a strong voice, bearing the Power an authority of the Head of House and Lord of Black Blood-Law; "I forbid and recuse all rights of entry to the lands, properties, edifices and vaults that fall under the purview of Black blood, or were delegated to business management, to Albus Dumbledore, his blood-kin, his allies, his hirelings, his elves, and any follower or supporter of his sectarian creed and cause. Id mote est."

Taking a steadying breath, Harry pursued "Furthermore, I forbid and recuse all rights of entry to the lands, properties, edifices and vaults that fall under the purview of Black blood, or were delegated to business management, to Remus John Lupin, his blood-kin, his allies, his hirelings, his elves, and any follower or supporter of his creed or cause, regardless of any debts that my Failed late-godfather, Sirius Orion Black III, may have incurred or not finished paying before his justified death by Line-Defilement and Oath-Breaking. Id mote est.

{ HP } --- { Potenteste in domus nigra cruore est } --- { HP }

Pursing his lips in memory of the attacks against the Potter and Black properties that were publicly known, Harry gave one last command with venom dripping from his words. "Kreacher, my faithful servant, raise the estate's wards to siege-time strength and severity. Let any who challenge the sanctity and quietude of the Black Manor know pain before Death takes them. By the Blackness of my Blood, so did I declare. Id mote est."

Kreacher bowed low before his master, basking in the aura of a fully empowered Lord Black such as had not occurred in more than a century. He had been a wee elfling the last time that any with the strength of body, mind, magic and soul to command the formidable Black Blood-Law had set foot in this house. Truly, it was a day of joy, celebration and prayers to the Divines!

Without a single word of reply, Kreacher put the finger of his right hand in position, jut under his right eye to visualize the magick and effect properly, then snapped the mightiest, proudest snap of his two-hundred and eight years of life. Receiving the command from their Lord through his bonded servant, the tremendously potent, dark and cruel blood-wards of House Black answered the call that hadn't been issued since the building was erected and their functions tested. Invisible to the naked eye yet felt by all for two full city blocks around and under the streets into the bowels beneath London, the many layers of energy barriers coalesced into something that warding professionals and curse-breakers hold as a legendary crafting rather than an accomplished fact. Within seconds, the House of Black disappeared from public awareness, the edifice and surrounding gardens turning unplottable, invisible, undetectable, odorless, soundless, heat-less and all vibrations dampened. A twin-layered Fidelius ward composed of a blood-magic sorcery and a religious faith consecration plexed together into something that Dumbledore could not conceive of existing, let alone find or break in this life.

The outer protective layers locked into place; repulsions against muggles, squibs, wizards, priests, psionicists, house-elves from other Houses or groups, multiple types of creatures, any who spied for enemies, any who wished harm to the Black Family, any with violent intent, any with intent to betray or sell information to outsiders, and a Forbiddance against those named by Harry as Anathema to the Black Blood-Law.

The inner defenses were last to manifest; a powerful ward called 'Living Building' activated for the first time in two centuries, cleaning and repairing the structure of the house from decades of filth, debris, insalubrity and vermins. A permanent set of 'Unseen Staff' appeared, translucent but solid enough to move objects with strength and care, to arrange furniture, storage, consumables and prepare all the living quarters. In the basement, once the level was cleaned and repaired, an empty bunker opened its walls to reveal hidden closets, cabinets and cupboards full of potions, components and medical equipments, then generated an 'Illusionary Infirmary Staff' to receive injured people for treatment. Powerful 'Storm Shield' and 'Projectile Repel' enchantments all around the estate's perimeter lit up, as similar localized versions on the doors and windows became four times stringer than before. Several small stone figurines throughout the house activated fully, actively purifying the air, water, food and medications in their vicinity from any poisons, maladies, drugs or impurities from being expired, preventing sabotage and treason from having effect on the defenders of the Manor.

Outside and inside the building, golems carved out of stone, iron or wood animated and began to patrol the estate. Covered in deeply engraved scriptworkes anchored to the constructs by the two refined Ember plugs that served as the golems' eyes, each statue was fully invisible, soundless, odorless, heat-less, and made no vibration in either the air, ground or furniture as it attacked. These monstrous creations were of differing shapes and sizes to keep enemies guessing wildly, and also wrapped in the foul dark aura caused by the permanent Cruciatus embedded in their cruel talons, fangs, horns and tail spikes. Each construct could also breathe out a cloud of gaseous curse that emulated Mummy Rot every ten minutes, or spit a brace of five 'Venomous Bullets' reaching up to 500 feet away every minute, due to their internal Ember crystal matrix.

In siege mode, he magical portraits of the House gained the ability to have wands and other foci appear in their image, according to what scene or people were painted. These could channel the magicks of the building with the same strength and ability as was programmed into the memorial matrix of the entities depicted, thus creating yet another layer for the Lord to depend on.

Harry stood in the main staircase of his House, feeling the wards awaken and raise around his person, caressing his soul-aura as they flared to full Power, eagerly awaiting the test of their faith and resolve in the newly installed Lord of the Black Blood. Any who dared would suffer beyond all compare before being released into the hands of Hades, if there was anything left to have.

Summer vacations 1992; a rude beginning

(Harry Potter - theme)

July 1992  
Multiple locations  
The British Isles & Europa

Young Harry Potter sat forlornly in the settee besides his bed, in the master suite of #12 Grimmauld Place, with Rehz curled on his lap like a scaly, ornery kitten with poisonous breath and delirious schemes. Gods but he loved that drake! It was in times like these that he realized just how much he had come to depend on his familiar for what remained intact of his sanity.

And, to his body and soul defending, he would never admit aloud just how much good it had done him to meet and befriend the people he had at Hogwarts. With only the small Faerie Drake and Tenebrous Pioneer for company over a few years, the kids at primary school or summer camps hadn't been enough to sustain his emotional growth and stability. He could see now that it was a bad kind of stubbornness on his part that had kept everybody at arms' length in those days.

Having the added company of Jippsy had helped heal his wounded soul and heart so much that most wizards in the magical communities would be ashamed of his weakness. He now understood just how stupid and limited that mindset was. Dryskholl and Jippsy had done for his welfare things that no human ever could, or would even offer. It looked like Kreacher was on the fast track towards doing the same too. Harry smirked at the memory of the elderly elf being agog when Harry had spoken in the secret elven tongue with Jippsy, when he asked her to prepare the suite for him. It was hard to say which between Parseltongue and the elf dialect impressed the old servant more.

Harry verified the seal on the potion he took from the side table, then quaffed the vial in one go. It was time for his old ritual of learning a pair of languages again. This time he was going to do a complement to his potion from last august, Cyrillic – Greek, by absorbing the Cyrillic – Russian derived languages. For the month of August he would add to his Latinate knowledge with French, going from ancient to modern with a few of the important dialects like Provençal, Louisiannais or Québécois.

Harry had just put the empty vial back in the small service tray on the table when the wards of the estate informed him that an elf belonging to the Black Blood from a cadet branch wanted audience with the master of the House. Dobby, elf of Narcissa Malfoy. Frowning, the child released his Battlestaff to float in the corner by the bed, out of immediate sight, and called both Kreacher and Jippsy to attend the meeting. Once escorted, he made sure that his tool belt was invisible under his luxurious purple velvet housecoat, and that he looked relaxed, without worries despite carrying hard steel and destructive spells. Snort! The elf would have sensed the siege wards activate all the way across the planet because of his link to the Black Blood, or would have clued-in when he was magically forced to 'knock' and present himself instead of just popping into wherever he wanted to appear.

Nasty stuff, those Black Blood-Wards, but then again, the family knew full well how exactly it was that house-elves traveled such long distances unhindered, so they had prepared adequately.

Smirking in a superior way, Harry signaled Kreacher to accept the related elf into the suite, to give his message to the Lord Black in person. Coming from the Malfoys, this could be interesting or truly bothersome. Time would tell.

The elf appeared before Harry with a small 'pouf!' that was just loud enough to politely announce his arrival but not so rash as to disturb ongoing conversations in the room. That was another thing about the wards; they opened a transit window to the authorized spot for arrival but prevented any divinations or Sight from perceiving anything until the entity was inside the ward sphere and the layers had closed back over the minuscule hole that had passed the energy beam.

Dobby was old, much, much older than Kreacher could ever hope to live, but it wasn't visible on his skinny frame or facial features. He looked like he had been abused and damaged many times in his long life, bearing the marks of injuries and disease alike on his green skin. He may have managed to fool the weak senses of ordinary humans, but this was the Black Manor and he stood before the Lord Black himself. The almighty siege wards, built into the original fieldstone foundations in the late 1100's, could pass through the elf's disguises and faked attitude with laughable ease. If the sensors were calibrated right, there may not have been organized human societies on the Britannic Islands when this elf was born to the world. In fact, Harry was starting to feel that he was looking at a very early edition of the house-elf sub-race.

Addressing the unexpected visitor straight in the native tongue of his kind, Harry asked what he wanted in the House of Black. While he tried hard to not let it show, the information about the elf's true age and experience had shaken him badly. If the being learned and grew as normal living entities did, having been born some four millenia ago would account for an immense level of education, lived experience and magical power, even if he borrowed it from others to enact his effects. This had to be approached with caution.

Dobby however bowed low, then slowly stood up, looking upon Harry with an odd sort of gleam in his eyes, the sort that the child had seen only in religious fanatics or the mentally ill who were completely disjuncted from reality by their superstitions and phantasms.

"I bees Dobby of House Peverell, passed to House Potter by legal inheritance, then illegally sold to House Black by Albus Dumbledore, when he usurped the guardianship of Heir Peverell, Potter and Black. I could not show my true allegiance or power until this day, nearly six hundred years after the last living Lord Peverell passed into the arms of his patron god, Hades. Dobby haves been waiting for a new Peverell to care for, waitings and waitings, passing from menial jobs to worse menial jobs, until today. The false bond be broken, the lies of Bad master whiskers be burned and House Peverell can live again."

Harry blinked both eyes a few times as he processed the words from the poor maligned being, coming quickly to understand the situation. And his rage against the bearded wanker grew anew in such way that the small mythalar pillar under the house began to spin on its axis, gathering power to send a magnificently cruel dark curse across the country at the feckless procreate of diseased vermin that had pillaged his heritage to the point of injuring those loyal to him and his ancestors. Taking a deep, carefully controlled breath, the child instinctively sent a thought to the power sink beneath the house, thanking its loyalty and readiness to serve, but asking that it be at peace for now. The time was scheming and tactics, striking would come later, at the proper time.

Harry was temporarily stunned to receive an actual answer from the ward-core, passing through the Black Blood-Law to reach him, assuring him of understanding and willingness to assist on creating those plots and machinations to destroy the enemies of the House. Jippsy had both hands to her mouth in astonishment at the deep connection her master had with his Families. Kreacher was smirking in a dark, fearsomely satisfied way that only a birthed Black could truly comprehend. And Dobby's eyes were ex-orbited, grown to the size of glowing soup bowls as he beheld the full strength of a true lord of magic roused from sleep, then gone quiescent again, knowing the time wasn't yet right to act in public.

But it would come.

Oh, it would come! And rotting blood would rain from the heavens unto the knaves!

"Tell me, faithful servant of my first House, how is it that you come to me this night? And why have you waited so long? I can sense your true and deep loyalty thrumming through the Peverell Blood-Law now that we are formally introduced. Why could I not feel you before?"

Dobby smirked nastily, explaining happily "It was dumb Dumbly-dorey's doings, master Harry Potter, sir. He tinker with what he knows not. He never bother to learn about house-elves, just like average wizards. Thinks elves serve by obligation to have magicks and nothing else. Stupid, short sighted magi, they all are. The House Peverell had other ideas! Yes, it did! No, the most masterful art of Peverell was that they undid the bastardy of the house-elf race. They undid the botched Key of Life that our originator had inflicted upon us, giving a few of our kind the chance to have full lives, even though we had to be slaves due to the laws in vigor. We were freed of birth and magic shackles, but not from the laws the tyrants made. So the Peverell founders had a brilliant idea; they helped us to mate with other, original elves, to produce elflings that were freer than their forebears. And thus, the race was freed, but at the same time, it was wholly bound to the House and Blood-Law of Peverell, for all times and realities they would exist."

Harry sat gobsmacked, well mouth agape like a gold fish out of its bowl, looking at the elf as if he had just declared that the species should trade in its traditional linen tea-towel togas for modern plastic trash bag tunics. It took the boy a good few minutes to reboot his mind into functioning order, and the combined efforts of Rehz smacking his arm with his tail and Jippsy bringing a full tea set for five persons before he was amongst the cognizant. Thanking Jippsy for her service, he offhandedly explained to Dobby that he had always felt a deeper connection to house-elves than humans since he met Dryskholl, so he systematically insisted that all elves be treated at least as well as human employees or contractors when in his presence. The goblin account managers at Gringotts found this atavism hilarious, but never questioned it, not even in his absence. Harry thought that he now understood why that was.

Studiously ignoring the smirking elves and dragonnet, he fixed his night tea with cream, honey and a generous dose of excellent Dwarven brandy from the upper Scottish Isles. Only to taste the cuppa and spit it out, swearing aloud he'd just poured a quarter ounce of fine hard booze in it, so where in Hallowed Nepenthe's catacombs had the liquor gone to? A smidgen of bratty humor from the mythalar pillar under the basement echoed around the wards, embalming the child and his friends like a mother's laughter. If said mother was an old, wrinkly, gray-skinned witch with warts and crooked teeth that enjoyed cursing the neighbors with living nightmares for fun.

Egads, but he loved the Blackness of his Blood and all it entailed!

It was a taste acquired harshly, yes, but so what? It was well worth it all.

Sending an answering pulse of mixed amusement and warning, he tasted the tea again, finding it to his proper liking. The wards had only suppressed the taste, not the active ingredients. A small advantage more for the Lord, if he needed to discretely potion the food or drink of recalcitrant guests bent on defrauding or attacking him inside his home. His ancestors really were paranoid, but then again, the existence of Dumbledore and the current state of the Family meant that they hadn't pushed the arts of prevention and scheming enough. That would be remedied soon.

Taking a good mouthful of his doctored tea, the 12 year old gazed amusedly at Rehz who sat on his haunches with a human teacup clutched between both fore-paws to have his own boozy treat before bed. Then again, with his psychedelic breath weapon gas, mundane alcohol wouldn't be a threat or hindrance to him, more of a simple spice, just like cinnamon or nutmeg for Harry.

Dobby waited for his master to be seated at rest and ready mentally before adding a few more little juicy tidbits from the distant past to make him understand events.

"You see master Harry Potter, sir, back in the deep antiquity, the Peverell founders had managed to break the fell powers of the evil necromancer who had created our race, but knew to keep it hush-hush or the clans and first churches of the Living Gods would have wanted them dead, after thy had taken their secret sciences from them. So they agreed to keep it silent, and only those elves who descend from those Blood-Law-Elves, or a first generation mixed birth, would ever know about the facts, but never discuss them outside the estates of Peverell. And they could never speak of it without a living, or undead, human member of the House by their side to anchor the Fidelius that covers the secrets and faith of the Family and its servants. That is why even when some elves -know- things or have a very old age, they can never speak of it, even in the hobbitons or elf glades where most of our race keeps the children and elderly, safely away from the evils and servitude of the human worlds."

Since Harry was again to stunned to comment, Dobby pursued his laundry-list of revelations that unraveled the already complex structure of wizarding history.

"The three good brothers who were the sons of the first Lord and Lady Peverell saw what their parents had wrought, how holy it was, and were in such awe that they immediately understood the grave peril, if it were found out by the villager elders. They would report to the clans and churches the danger to their prestige and Power, for that was what house-elves meant back then. So, the sons each created a powerful artifact of the necromancer's art, to obfuscate the true masterpiece of the Family; the so called Three Deathly Hallows. Nothing but decoys to bother the plebes. Strong yes, especially compared to the pitiful sticks and runestones that were all anybody had to fight with back then, but still just decoys."

Snorting in amusement as his eyes looked to a past only he could see, Dobby continued softly; "The fabled Death Stick, Wand of Destiny, Penultimate Focus... Bah! Nothing more than a piece of alder wood with a simple braided thestral hair core and some ash from cremating the bodies of curse-bitten vampires and werewolves, glued together with Nightsoil tilled by a Tenebrous Pioneer under a Black Moon. You could do the same, master Harry, if you's wanted to try. You's Battlestaff has more Power and abilities than the old Backscratching Twig, as Antioch called his creation."

Huffing in further amusement, Dobby said "Cadmus was ashamed of his Nut of Human Dumbness, because it worked in the inverse of any logic or magic. Inside a True Noble Dragon, in the brain, between the lobes, is a perfectly round, white gland called Pearl of Wisdom that acts for their species the way that the 'Blood Compact' or Blood-Adoption acts for humans. But, the necromancer had studied the way this Pearl worked, so he made a small, round, black stone that does the opposite. Legends call it The Resurrection Stone, but it doesn't touch the Realm of the Dead at all. It just scans the user's soul-aura to find factum about his deepest desires and who they tie to, then projects a fake phantom of them next to the unlucky fool. It worked so well as a decoy that even some of the Peverell Family fell for its lure, over time. Imbeciles, the lot of them. The Grimoire, and later the 'Blood Compact' warns of these items being useless. But children never listen until they burn their fingers on the hot stove, don't they?"

Dobby looked into empty air as he reminisced his own master, the man first human to ask him to serve his Family; "But the one who crafted the most useful item was Ignotus, a good man and husband, a better father and great friend. He was my master, but he never dominated my kind nor asked us to commit indignities in his service. He wrought the very first Cloak of Invisibility, the one that all others are made to emulate, but never achieve fully. Recent alchemists have tried to use the shed hairs of animals that are naturally invisible to weave cloth then fashion a cloak. What a stupid idea! And long and painful for no reason. Ignotus did it simply and efficiently, in a way that endures to this day, after almost four millenia. He took thestral skin and tanned it thinner than vellum, then used spells to cut it as thin as wool thread after spinning on the wheel. He buried the bobbins in a patch of Nightsoil in the garden for a year, letting the Tenebrous Pioneer till the patch each time he passed the zone during his duties. At the end of the year, the magical but mortal skin filaments had been manipulated by the Minor God so many times that they had been transmogrified into Funeste Relics of Hadean Power. It was then left to his good mother to weave the bolt of cloth, and his wife cut and fashioned the cloak's basic shape, giving it the look of what the Tenebrous Pioneers wear. Then, he steeped the formed garment into a vat of enchanting oil to which he added holy oils of the cult of Hades and Living Blood of his own hands in Willing Tithe. This blessed the cloak with a permanent religious Fidelius ward that was anchored to the filaments and the blood-oil at the same time. Only those who see the wearer under the cloak at least once in their life will ever be able to use spells to detect its presence, but not see what's under unless it is the person they first saw with it. Easy process, if a mite long."

Dobby suddenly tilted his head to the side, as if listening to something in the distance, before excusing himself to answer mistress Narcissa. It was important to act as if they were still his owners, at least until master Harry Peverell – Potter – Black was ready to reveal himself openly.

The excited, truly venerable house-elf... No! Blood-Law-Elf... Popped out of reality, traveling through the Neverland dimension to respond his mistress' demands.

In disappearing so suddenly, the elf had left the human child and Faerie Drake with so many damned questions that it wasn't even funny anymore. Until Harry saw the expression of pure, unadulterated glee residing on Kreacher's face. Every Black instinct inside Harry was screaming to get out of the room to preserve his sanity and health. Nothing good could come of elves who had such mien on their visage.

Except that Harry's experiences with house-elves have always been much better, and much more fruitful, than those with any human to date. Maybe it would change later, but now that was the state of things. So he stayed, and listened to the elderly elf plot dastardly things with his younger housekeeper. It was after that last discussion that he withdrew into his trunk, his true home, with a migraine, spinning head, whirling eyes and nausea enough that even the stomach soothing potion just didn't want to work on him.

Bherk!

At least he wasn't actually sick or anything. So why did he have the damnable feeling that he and Rehz had just heard the Unspeakable uttered aloud inside the sanctity of the Black Blood-Wards?

Well, Dobby wasn't finished with his stories, so he'd be back. Not like he had much of a choice, since Harry was the only Peverell who was alive and magical at the same time. And he was also blessed by Hades, which seemed to be an important feature, in a House full of necromancers and their support staff.

Gods but his life was getting weirder than a drug dream! Momma! Come help your boy!

Preview of chapter 3;

Harry's trying to swallow and digest everything that Dobby has told him, but there's more coming, and then things get really wonky.

After a few meetings and July passed by at duel-casting speed, Dobby arrives in early August with a dire warning. A cruel, evil plot against Harry Potter awaits at Hogwarts, and the boy won't be able to defeat or bypass it, not with the Croaker Brothers and treasonous Unspeakables behind everything.

This places Harry before a hard, gut-wrenching decision; as September 1st arrives, will he go to Hogwarts at all, and if he doesn't, what happens to his relatives and friends who do?

So many plots, schemes and machinations abound, but all have forgotten two capital facts in all this convoluted Minotaur's dream of a labyrinth: Harry's Blood is truly Darker than Black, and Dobby has almost 5,000 years of secrets in his Bag of Holding that nobody except a few liches or Noble Dragons are still aware of.

And nobody asked the goblins what they think, but that's coming too, as sure as taxes and death.


	3. Not a world for children

The author wishes to express thanks to anyone who may read this story and encourages them to leave reviews, comments or even flame it hard. As with any who try their hand at publicly expressing an idea or story concept, all feedback is important and welcome.  
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, the Torchlight games, nor any other sci-fi or fantasy series, movies, comics, cartoons or news items used in this fiction as they belong to the creators, broadcasters or publishers who put them out for consumption by the public.

In response to the reviews; the Dumbledore bashing was a vital necessity of the story's plot because you can't make thousands of people as chronically stupid as the wizarding world is without a major force being implicated. In this case, a criminal who lives over a century while having access to drugs, implants and occult powers used his unfettered access to children to groom them from an early age to worship him. Since I depict their community as just one small sect amongst many, it fits the psychological profiles and mechanisms of fanatics and preachers fully. But Albus is only a product of his obsolete epoch and society. He wasn't the only one raised that way that still lives, and he in turn influenced nearly fourteen generations of kids doing seven years in Hogwarts as a teacher, headmaster and superior government official.

THE RUINED PEOPLES

THIRd chapter: Not a world for children

Summer vacations 1992, continued

(Harry Potter - theme)

July 1992  
#12 Grimmauld Place  
London, The Britannic Realms

Harry Potter,the much maligned Lord of Houses Peverell, Black and Potter was taking a slow morning, steeping himself in the bathtub like a large teabag, with bath salts and aromatherapy soaps to help stave off the stresses from last evening. He laid his head against the waterproof bath pillow, closing his luminous green eyes in an attempt to reach the level of peace required for meditation and stability.

The 12 year old boy hadn't actually passed his twelfth birthday yet but felt he'd earned the age a while back, and that maybe he was closer to twenty-one than the measly twelve. Then again, he was just a kid; what did he know?

A whole bloody lot of things, that's what he knew!

And an unfair batch of them were either Anathema to Magyck or Unspeakable in the Realms of Britannia, just because that was the type of -blessed- life that he lived (HEAVY sarcasm).

The ennobled child grumbled a few choice swears in Thanatos under his breath that had the unfortunate effect of accidentally chilling his bathwater under the icing point, almost freezing his own balls off without thinking about it. A quick elemental manipulation of the water later had him sitting back at ease, swearing in Parseltongue about his lacking control over his magicks, a plight that all children under the age of 13 shared all too commonly. And Harry had A LOT of magicks inside of him, just begging to get out and do things to the environment nearby.

After a relaxing quarter hour more, the internal clock charm he had set tolled a chime inside his mind, rousing him from his partial meditation to finish washing and get dressed for the day. He was already passed morning tea, but after the night he had yesterday, nobody wanted to blame him for having the morning in bed with a headache potion for company. He really should see about buying the stuff in bulk gallons, or brewing his own. Maybe Draco would help? Neville certainly had all the herbs in his installations, they'd checked during the school year what kinds of services they could barter between them. And soon Hermione would be able to trade with them too, when her own household setup was finished.

Finally dried off, Harry dressed in the clothes he had come to enjoy wearing so much, after a decade of having nothing but hand-me-downs from Dudley or worse, things he'd scrounged out of trash bins around Surrey. Looking in the mirror at the multiple scars and discolorations from diseases that littered his body, the child took courage and solace from the words of King Ragnok, that these were the proofs of his strength and victory over enemies. He was marked but survived and grew to be better, wiser, and stronger than the ordeals that imprinted upon his flesh. No shame did he have in this, only pride for being alive and sane enough to speak of it.

Maybe someday he'd believe it too.

Sighing in contentment, the boy slipped on the black Docker style trousers, white button shirt and black waistcoat that had a purple & silver pattern embroidered on the front panels. He finished with comfortable rubber soled hiking shoes, a concession to modernity that came from a small family shop in Hedgerow Terrace owned by squibs. The artisans emulated the styles and functions of mundane footwear but used magical ingredients and embossed scriptworkes for durability, cleanliness and preventing odors. Similar shops in the colorful populous area did the same with other pieces of clothing, from underwear to formal suits, to beach or sports clothes. His entire wardrobe had been updated to such fashions the moment he had begun living full-time inside his trunk, and he wouldn't go back to the old dichotomy of mundane OR wizarding without any middle point. Besides, these artisans were doing exactly what his mother had wanted to achieve with medicine in her lifetime, so he would encourage them as much as he could, in her memory and for his very clear benefits.

Now that he was washed, dressed, and no longer had a team of ogres digging through his brain with mattocks, a good meal was in order. Exiting the dimensional trunk, the young boy walked happily from the master suite through the newly cleaned #12 Grimmauld Place, feeling great pride and satisfaction at the sight of things he hadn't been able to notice in his first day. Passing by his adoptive grand-mother's portrait in the stairs, he saluted her kindly, pleased to see that she seemed to remain saner than was usual before his arrival. Maybe his order to bring the wards to full activity had something to do with it? The subject would go on the list of 'not survival' items he wanted to delve into, when events were safe and finished with.

Walking down to the first basement, he smiled freely as the wonderful smells of elf-made food wafted around him, embalming him in a feel of safety, home and love that he had never gotten from any human in his life, except perhaps his late mother when he was in her arms. Sitting at the large wooden table that usually served to prepare food or feed the waitstaff, he smirked amusedly at the sight of Rehz, already laid out on the ventral couch he had crafted for his familiar. The stygian Faerie Drake was happily munching on fresh raw bacon slices as if it were going out of fashion. Not the least slowing down his consumption, the reptile raised his tail to salute Harry with a peppy wave of the spiked limb.

Huffing in humor at how normal the weirdness of his life had gotten to be, the boy brought the day's Daily Prophet, or Yesterday's Trash as he preferred to call it, close to his place so he could read and eat at the same time. Due to some modernizations he had imported from his mother's work in the trunk, a small counter-top crystal generator produced electricity to power hybrid versions of a wizarding wireless and a television, installed in a hutch that had been cleared of junk by Jippsy during the night. Kreacher was looking at the upscale wireless proudly, but the TV set had him pursing his lips, muttering about 'idiot box' and 'dumbing down wizards' in elf-tongue when he didn't think Harry would hear him.

{ HP } --- { Once more into the breach } --- { HP }

Harry almost spat out his mouthful of hot tea when he read the Prophet headlines. In bold black characters that winked to attract attention, the banner title said "Bring Back Dumbledore! The only true national hero of wizarding Pureblood culture in four centuries!" The article that followed was not in anyways reporting, nor even editorializing, but a full-out pamphlet for an electoral platform just unveiled by Lady Jhessandre Duluth, Head of Family, Lady of House Coalthrough, enacted after the death of her husband and only son, both traitors to Britannia executed in the last Yule season.

Harry plunked his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands, suddenly hit by a wave of despair at the sheer endemic stupidity of human wizard-kind. Were any of them still able of rational thought, or were they all inept children waiting for a Hero or Savior to come and make everything better, without cost or effort on their part? Numskulled, balls-less pieces of offal, the entire lot of them! Exhaling an angry burst of air by the nose, Harry pounded the table with both fists, forcing himself to read through the undiluted crapulence that disfigured the paper pages.

The second front-page text under the fold was yet more dung, the reporter citing 'anonymous' sources in the Department of Mysteries, as if you could find anything else in that cesspit. The poor fool just repeated verbatim a conspiracy theory, debunked since last year, that Harry may very well have a piece of Voldemort still inside of him, since the only proof offered of his health was the report from goblin healers. The text had a clear, specist and fascist slant, demanding that Harry be submitted by force to examination at the hands of the Unspeakables to verify "What is it that the foul, subhuman under-beings have hidden from wizard-kind about one of our precious titled Lords who sits in the Hallowed Wizengamot?". The reporter made no efforts to hide his own bigotry, nor that of his purported sources, completely unconcerned by the easily predictable backlash it would generate. Then again, with the utter pussbag written by Barnabas Cuffe at the top of the page, most people's attention would be elsewhere.

The following pages were a bit better, with a surprising full-page text from Buckingham Palace to establish officially some facts that children and teachers who were at school may not have been made aware of. That text was the Queen and Britannic government's formal position on all of the crimes and investigations that had happened or were ongoing. Further details about the multiple elevations to Lordship of children or teenagers in the last twelve months were given to fight the slew of fakes and frauds who were trying to destabilize society, commit Line-Theft or Title-usurpation.

Beginning on page five was a very graphic table bearing the auror mugshots of prisoners, their full identity and titles or jobs at the moment of arrest, their crimes, proofs of guilt and sentences. That presentation was typeset very airily to spread over three pages, with small innocuous ads lined at the very bottom of each page to avoid causing upset among the kin of the deceased.

Starting on page eight was a set of formal biographies of all the Lords or Heads of Family that had been elevated since Dumbledore's heart attack took him off the gameboard. This table took many pages, actually composing a quarter of the edition with how many new faces were raised in status or nobility. Each bio stated the new Lord or Head, their spouse, the Heir Primus and important political, religious or business affiliations that could influence the person's decisions.

Towards the end of the paper were several opinion pieces, some written by freelance reporters who had gotten the Prophet interested, and others were from 'ordinary' citizens. In reality, quite a few of these read like they came from professional writers or public relations firms, hidden under the guise of being from 'a concerned Welsh Wiccan wizard' and such tripe. Harry duly noted that not a single opinion piece came from a woman, nor from any who weren't full-human. Everything felt choreographed from behind the scenes as several letters made references to the same concepts or fake-news items that had been debunked as propaganda from Cornelius Fudge, Dolores Umbridge or Bartemius Crouch at their diverse trials. Two texts openly referenced "The need for strict obedience and utter submission of children under the Wands of their Elders, as so beautifully elocuted by the Hogwarts Board of Governor's Lord Myzere, through his solicitor, Madam Umbridge, esquire."

Using the charms from Archivistics and Library Mastery spell-lists, Harry was quickly able to find enough commonality of concepts, style and tone of discourse to decipher that only three authors had written eleven of the fourteen opinion pieces. The other three were from parents about the changes at Hogwarts, supporting the modernizations and praising the anti-bullying campaign that the Headmaster had put in place from the first day in office.

Finishing his brunch plate, Harry motioned for another refill of tea while he called his portable writing kit from the trunk. Setting the wooden lectern on the table in front of him, he pulled out fresh paper sheets embossed with the House Peverell crest to send formal messages to several people. One was to his solicitors' office to look into this Lady of House Coalthrough thingie, and what the Hells was her mental defect that she'd want to be potioned and mind-raped repeatedly again? Or was she simply a patsy spouting aloud what she was paid to spew?

The other letter was to his account managers, to make certain that all his investments were disengaged from the families of ALL traitors and criminals condemned by the Queen or lower courts, if they used the full doses of veritaserum in open tribunal to have honest witnesses. He also ordered that any relatives or employees of these Families and Houses be removed from all his rental properties, housing or commercial, when their current lease expired. He explained that he feared they would use the limited access to either wreck the buildings or try to retro-engineer the ward schemes to find and attack his own residence. The series of riots the aurors had to put down in Diagon District certainly led to that conclusion.

Finally, he tasked the goblins to see if they could contact discretely Heir Longbottom and Lady Dagworth-Granger to offer support and economic ties without it becoming public knowledge to avoid yet more civil unrest and conspiracy theories about them emerging in the papers.

The final letter was addressed to Her Britannic Majesty, Elizabeth II, in Buckingham Palace, to inform her of the manipulation of public opinion he had discovered in the Prophet, so that her men in government and Military Intelligence could keep an open eye on where this all went. It was obviously a basic plot by racists and human supremacists to influence the Welsh Wiccan sect and parallel groups into unrest, but maybe they wanted to go further and foment an actual revolution against the lawfully seated Wizengamot who stood by the Right-of-Rule of the Crown.

Harry handed the signed and sealed letters to Kreacher who would post them via the secured mailbox in the trunk. The answers would take time, but this was nothing if not a long game, with stakes covering centuries of past history and potentially decades or centuries of future laws, rights and Powers. Nothing would be happening fast, nothing that was truly meaningful anyways.

{ HP } --- { Dobby's second coming } --- { HP }

Harry was walking around the somewhat large townhouse that was called Black Manor, getting even more impressed as time passed. The charmed mass-cleaning and renovations had done wonders for the antique estate, bringing back a level of artistry and glory that few domains had ever boasted. To think that the decrepit flats on either side of his house had once been similar, but had been sold to cheapskate developers who partitioned each floor as separate apartments to have medium-price flats to rent. And then, over the last fifty years since WW-II, these units had been left to slowly decay, becoming shabby low-rent tenements that were the visible shame of the once quaint and upscale round-point.

Harry was silently elaborating a plan to see how much it would cost to buy the adjacent buildings and renovate everything back to the caliber, quality and artistry that had been the benchmark of these lofty domains, at the beginning of the 1900's. He could certainly use a better type of citizenry than the menial drug peddler loitering in the park that he spied from the fourth floor window, when he passed by during his tour of the level. It was as he aimed for the smaller stairs to the attic that Harry felt the siege wards around the estate signal that an allied elf requested an audience with the Lord Black.

Dobby was back.

Ah shyte! What in the many, hard pumping fucks would he tell them this time?

Was there some damned law in England that promulgated that Harry Bloody Potter couldn't have a simple, relaxing summer vacation like other kids? This was getting ludicrous. Walking down to the first floor den, he sent the inexplicably -amused- wards the thought to direct Dobby to his destination so that he could sit comfortably instead of falling on his ass from whatever stunning revelations the elf would drop on his poor hide. He was way too old for this crap!

Mumbling foul things under his breath, the boy strolled into the living room to see that Rehz and the three elves were present, as was a large decorative tea set made of sterling silver that was normally pulled out for high occasions and holidays. Oddly appropriate, in a way, but it served to remind Harry of the many unsavory things that Dobby hadn't had the time to spill out yesterday.

Taking place in the massive wingback chair reserved for the Lord of the Manor, the child made a vague sign for everybody to sit as they would, gripping the wooden arms of the plush chair with tight, white-knuckled grips. Dobby bowed low towards him, smirking slyly as he saw the raw disbelief etched on the child's face. Surrounded by three snickering elves and a boisterous dragonnet, Harry had little choice but to endure with grace. Okay, maybe he sulked just a little; he was still eleven years old till three weeks from now, so he had the right of it.

Dobby decided to take up his tale where he left off last night. "I's told you's of the old Peverell decoys and how they were made. The legend of The Master of Death was just another idiocy that the Family came up with to occupy enemies away from the homestead. Neither of the items were ever conceived to work together, and holding them on the same person won't do anything. The wand and cloak used to be pretty powerful for their epoch, but the stone was never anything but a fool's trap. In fact, if you carry the stone for any reason or use it in battle, you'll probably drop your chances of survival to 10% of what they were before you obtained the accursed crystal."

Nodding firmly, Harry accepted this easily. The stories Dobby had told were pretty clear that each brother had worked alone on his project, not that they coordinated or used a conjoined shop to craft the artifacts. Not to mention the length of time needed for the stone and cloak made collaboration nigh on impossible.

Dobby shrugged helplessly as he finished that part of the tale; "The human wizards are an odd species. Every three centuries or so, a supposed scholar will appear who says that he knows the truth of the Peverell Relics and claims to have published the definitive, and only true account, of their existence. Presently, most think that the Deathly Hallows were made in the 1300's in the Peverell farmstead that existed in Godric's Hollow at the time. In reality, that farm was a dowager's residence, used to safely lodge the retired or ailing members of the Family or House that shouldn't be around rituals or alchemy workshops. The pregnant mothers used to spend their last month of expectancy there, in company of the old grand-mothers and aunts to have help when the babies came."

Shaking his head at just how much of his House history had been distorted, Harry asked, dreading the answer all the same, "And where exactly were these nefarious tools crafted, then?"

Dobby smirked as he answered "Not on Earth. Not in the Prime Material Plane. The Peverell used the old rituals to open a gate unto the Styx River demi-plane, where the Family had built permanent homes and shops to trade with ships that sail between the curtains of the Realities."

Okay, that explained a lot. Harry looked at Rehz Ib Fettach, thinking that if a 10 year old kid can just summon a familiar from outside the material plane, then gating out & back shouldn't be that hard for adults with a few decades of accumulated experience and skills. These things were probably in the grimoire or 'Blood Compact' but he hadn't finished reading through the centuries of accumulated lores and spells. No doubt there was a map of the gateways used and the places where they led.

The rest of the meeting was passed in pleasant and happily innocuous discussions that didn't shake the world anymore. Dobby had few things to tell Harry about the Peverell that could not be found inside his inherited memories, or the grimoire in the bank vault. The last important revelation of the day was that the Greatly Spiritual Family had helped the goblin nation establish itself in the Britannic Isles and dig out the first sub-floors for the bank's mines. This gave the Peverell the honor of holding Vault Moebius on level 0 of the institution, right next to the vaults of the English Monarchs. Harry's ancestors had decided to give their vault a name rather than a number for religious and magical reasons, stating that the contents of the vault would never be 0 or a negative quantity, as it would forever hold the Trust of the Peverell towards the goblins, and also keep the most fundamental heirlooms of the clan, thus never empty or dormant either.

Harry had much to digest that day, when Dobby left to care for the Malfoys in Wiltshire, for dinner and the evening. He had told the child he would not come back for a few days, to space out the visits to avoid garnering attention from evil eyes. It would also let the boy get familiar with his new surroundings at a more sedate pace, since he didn't have any threats to face presently.

Summer vacations 1992; Poisoned pens and minds

(Harry Potter - theme)

July 1992  
Welsh Wiccan Ministry of Magic  
London, The Britannic Realms

"Are you both sure the system worked as planned?" Algernon Croaker asked the two felonious Unspeakables as they stood at attention in front of his brother Saul's desk, in his office, deep in the bowels of the Department of Mysteries. The foul old man was yet again fomenting plots to unseat the Longbottoms from their high perch, and that Potter bastard too, now that he was no longer under the wand-shafting bastard's beard.

Nodding, Agent Ullick reported "We have watchers across the smaller villages where pockets of Welsh Wiccan population have congregated over the last five centuries, cohabiting with magicals, squibs and muggles of other groups. When the newspaper was delivered this morning, our Observers could easily spot the colored tags to know which copies were drugged, charmed, both or neither. They have tabulated the data on the main map, as displayed."

Agent Graddhe confirmed in his usual monotone drone "The best effect for manipulating the population's minds into committing to a course of action is to enchant low-power, short-term charms in the Mentalism Realm to the paper pulp, while mixing a subtle decantation of discord elixir with enchanting oil into the ink. A special magical printing press with a set of extra plates must be built, similar to the muggles' color news presses. One roller will crimp the scriptworkes in the vertical edges of the paper sheets and pre-wet spots with the discord-oil, then the second roller will press the regular ink texts and images, with the third roller applying the short-term animation charms and preservation oil on the pictures and graphs."

Saul Croaker grunted assent, saying "Good. If we can get this trial-run done quickly, we should be ready by the end of August to start doing some real damage to these six little mongrels. They dared to try taking Power they had no right to have from the rightful hands of Superior Wizards and emasculate the Ministry at the same time! They dared to subordinate US to mere muggles by using their damned useless queen as a puppet! Well me pretties, we'll be showing them! Go!"

Bowing to their Director, the two criminal agents left silently, obedient as ever.

Dumbledore wasn't the only mind-control adept in the country, and he certainly didn't count as an expert of any standing. No, that honor belonged to Saul Croaker; mind-healer, alchemist, Ember-smith and holder of muggle neurology and neurosurgery diplomas.

The two agents would obey his will unto suicide and Oath-Breaking or handing him their Lines if he commanded it, for that was the power of the 'Nerve-Spike' crystal implants he had put into their heads, linking their minds to the Blood-Law of House Croaker for eternity. His tests showed that the Spikes worked even on beings turned into undead, so long as the soul was in the original body that had the physical refined Ember filaments installed. An easy thing to insure.

Gazing towards his older and nastier brother, the enchanter and spell-crafter of the duo, Saul asked softly "Are we certain that this is the best course of action? After what Britannia did to those traitors that were stupid enough to get caught with Crouch and Fudge... You know what is at stake here. We would die in inhumane dishonor, then the English Crown would seize what's left of House Croaker's birthrights to gift to its own allies at will, or sell at auction again. There is no coming back into the Windsor's good graces after a move like this. And the ICW will help them hunt us down like mongrels, the moment it fails."

Algernon stood up to got serve himself a fresh cup of steaming coffee, an American vice he had come to enjoy after being exiled to their continent for a decade, after losing the House Title at the hands of that damnable bastard Francis Longbottom. Swallowing a mouthful of scalding liquid, the bitter, choleric old man replied in a harsh whisper "It won't matter anymore, if we fail. I lost the Title, rank, style and position decades ago, so we only have some money and the two houses we live in to worry about. Both buildings are already in the names of foreign companies based in Basel, and we're only listed as tenants. As for any personal possessions, the auto-vaulting charms will send everything across the Atlantic to the Kobold bank in Argentina, outside extradition treaties"

Even more bitter, the geriatric traitor mumbled "We both have no children and can't have any. Due to the curses we got hit with during the fight against Grindelwald, we can't even Blood-Adopt via ritual or potions, and our ancestral crypts were destroyed by Francis Longbottom, as part of his retaliation when I lost the defamation suit he pulled in front of the Wizengamot. We don't have any ancestral materials to perform rituals with, and a solely spiritual adoption would only transfer a bit of coin and the name, something a muggle paper-adoption can do just as well."

Agreeing, Saul sipped his tea but still had qualms. "I still think this plan is too convoluted, too overly complex, like we're trying to pay homage to our own intellectual magnificence, the way that Dumbledore did with his endlessly circular machinations. Look where he is now... I don't want to be his cellmate under Gringotts, waiting for the goblins to decide which level of enhanced cruelty is appropriate since their king is in attendance to the executions. I can go to my grave without undergoing -those- kinds of things, thank you very much."

Grunting in assent, Algernon replied tartly "We both know that this is just a one-way portkey for both of us. We're planning how to leave a glowing wizard mark on the world as we die, not how we rule eternally as liches from thrones of bones set in the Ministry atrium or Hogwarts' great hall. This is nothing more than a prolonged suicide schedule. I can feel my magicks leaving me, Saul. I can feel the Rule of Britannia reasserting itself over Her Imperial Realms, colonies and Commonwealth, just as easily as I can feel that I'm this close to Oath-Breaking backlash already. There isn't any way out of this for me than with a bang, and I hope to take as many of the fucking wankers with me as I can."

Nodding Saul, pushed the empty cup aside, standing to walk closer to the map of England, Scotland and Ireland that was charmed to stick to the wall. The large sheet of magically crafted paper had the geology, landscape & landmarks in diverse colors, and animated mobile tags that represented the targets of their Family's ire and hatred for centuries. The unholy alliances gathered by the Blacks and Potters had sullied the name of Croaker since the founding of Hogwarts, the Longbottoms had beheaded them, the Bones had sharpened the ax, and the bloody Malfoys had held them down while the blade took out their neck and honor in one swoop.

Algernon was right; it was time to strike, while either old crone had any magic or life-force left in them, before the Britannic Crown demanded that all Ministry employees and contractors take the new, reinforced versions of the loyalty oaths. The only way they could break these chains was to attack them in the transport crate, for once they were around their wrists and necks, it would be too late to escape or fight back. The new oaths would leave no wiggle room, and no Dumbledore loophole à la "Greater Good of Wizarding Light" anymore. Even the Unspeakables would not be granted exemptions for research, or special dispensations for Black-Ops, as had been the case in the past, since the founding of England's Wizengamot. No, the sitting government had learned its lesson about insuring loyalty and lawfulness, so people like the Croaker Brothers only had one single avenue of escape left; self-destruction in a blaze of magicks.

Summer vacations 1992; Red tide in the fields

(Harry Potter - theme)

July 1992  
The Burrow  
Devon, The Britannic Realms

Arthur Weasley sat silently in his odd curved-roof shed, a product of something he had seen in the muggle world and copied on the farmstead, much to Molly' annoyance, which of course was the second biggest reason to do it this way. The first reason was that he had needed a heavily shielded redoubt from which to contact his father Septimus, Head of Family, Lord of House Weasley, to make certain their millennial plans were still apace. Arthur ensured nobody went into his shed by littering it with useless muggle junks and baubles he'd collected over his four decades of life, so it looked like an abandoned pawn shop. He also carried out most of the children's harsher physical punishments with the cane in here, to psyche them negatively against any curiosity or desire to even be near the place of pain.

Molly never came to the shed because Arthur had set an antiquated Spousal-Denial ward that he had found in Arabia during his mastery apprenticeship for muggle-world expertise. It had been the standard manner in which sultans and sheikhs had warded their harem against their official wives, in case the mother of the heirs decided to 'clean house' due to jealousy or being discovered infertile, thus eligible for a divorce and replacement by the concubines. Since Molly Prewett had the exact same temper, Arthur thought it quite the amusing joke to blockade her with something that had almost been designed with her specifically in mind.

Contrary to all public opinions, Arthur Weasley was a very competent, very able man, who just played the part of the stupid adolescent who had been captured by a love potion just coming out of school. He knowingly played the henpecked husband to perfection, so much so that neither Molly, her aunt Muriel Prewett, their children, nor the rest of the Welsh Wiccan community knew otherwise. Even the great and mighty Albus Dumbledore had fallen into the pit-trap of believing that Arthur was an imbecilic nincompoop, especially when he had let his father Septimus rip the title of Heir Presumptive from him to pass it to his middle brother Antoine Weasley, a magical craftsman.

Bah! What was the title worth, anyways?

Two centuries ago, the Weasley lord of the time had tried a very cunning but ineptly executed maneuver to entrap the Malfoy Head into becoming party to a crime against the Wizengamot's seated lords. The goal was to stand aside while Malfoy and three of his allies unwittingly committed an offense that was minor but scandalous, thus risking nothing of his own. The Lord Weasley would witness events then blackmail the Malfoy group into paying him for his silence by accepting to subscribe marriage contracts between their families to elevate the Weasley to Most Ancient and Most Noble status at long last. Instead, the blasted Lord Malfoy had gone to the Wizengamot and submitted the memories from his auto-pensiever, duly notarized by Gringotts, to show his group had been entrapped by House Weasley for Line-Theft via rigged marriage contracts and blackmail. The result being that what little wealth the Weasleys owned had been seized as fines for the government while their Gamot seat was auctioned, the money from the sale being split between Malfoy and his three allies. It was how House Goyle got elevated to the Gamot, instead of waiting another 100 years for their turn at the general nominations. Malfoy's ally had bought the seat with a loan from his patron, to be repaid under an oath of Fealty for 250 years instead of reimbursing the monies.

So, Arthur had lost nothing at all by letting the title float down to his brother, except a batch of yearly paperwork to keep their House petition for appeal alive in the tribunals. Since they had not a chance in Hell to succeed, it was a lost cause but it was also part of the aura of farmer's poverty and rural despair that their family had cultivated (funny that!) along their crops and schemes for ten centuries, since the Welsh wizarding sect had founded Hogwarts in Scotland.

The Weasleys had far better things to worry about than titles, rank, styles and positions of Houses in a parliament that had almost no bearing on Reality. Nobody outside the 10,000 souls of the Welsh Wiccan sect ever bothered with the Wizengamot and its self-styled 'noble houses' anyways.

No, the real reason the Weasleys accepted being poor was that their magicks had always come from Mother Gaia, and this geodesic magic was much harder to access when inside artificial structures made of concrete and steel. Hogwarts had been built of quarried and cut stone blocks not just because that was the technique known at the time, but because a majority of the witches and wizards of the epoch still had similar occult needs to have the Living Earth around them to cast properly. Arthur smirked as he thought of the true reason why there were so many squibs nowadays in Britain; modern wizards had left religious devotion to Gaia by the wayside, and lived in homes made of bricks, wooden planks and forged metal pipes, all dead and removed from Gaia's touch. The result was a first wave of low-powered or less-capable spell-users, several of whom compounded the misdeed by trying to 'purify' their bloodlines through inbreeding, causing worse ailments. After several generations of trying to become purer, you got the first squibs appearing, as a sign that these families had withdrawn from Gaia's blessings entirely. If the idiots had looked at muggle society like he did, thy would know about the diverse syndromes that had hit the monarchic Families of Europe in the 1600's and 1700's which had made them rethink the entire management of their Dynasties, arranged marriages and heredity.

All of the living Weasleys had large families composed mostly of strong spell-users who could deploy Channeling, Essence or Mentalism with much greater ease than the Lords in their manors. The few who had psionics were using them at a higher strength and with more varied skillset than the average men-of-wealth in the upper crust. The same could be seen all over Hedgerow Terrace, resplendent with Gaia's bounty, or the rural villages that were not under the sole jurisdiction of the Welsh Wiccan Ministry. Hogsmead was a dastardly example of just how stupid and backwards all the middling Purebloods and their imbecilic Ministry bureaucrats were. They had tried to plan a village and manage its population with principles based on the unnatural thought that papers & pens could replace all ancient or natural magicks, or that their voted human laws were a better Power than what came out of an Earthly wand.

Poor, deluded fools...

Arthur looked at the invisible sheets of paper on the workbench, lying under a religious Fidelius ward that was enchanted into each individual sheet to keep anybody but himself from seeing them, especially Molly or the two youngest. Heritage tests done on blood samples at St-Mungo's at his request. One sheet for each child that Molly had birthed. The five first were his, the two last were a gut-churning mess. The Prewett family had not been known just for its deleterious potions and loose-morale women; they had also historically worshiped Habberath, god of horrors, monsters, and biodiversity, the genitor of all entities. The Prewett had a very long story of stealing Blood-Lines or Defiling them if they were successfully rebuffed. These women had used sex, pregnancy, murderous abortion and illegal birthing as Title & House stealing weapons for nearly two millenia now. The entire human community of magical Britain was holding its breath in hopes these thieving, sacrilegious sluts would end with Molly. Then, the bitch in heat had a daughter, when it shouldn't have physically happened.

Arthur certainly could not have daughters. He had taken a potion for this since he was eleven years old, when his parents had seen that he would be in school with a Prewett girl the same age. It had been a necessary precaution to protect their remaining House wealth and Bloodline, since their adjudicated dishonor in the Gamot meant that the Prewett would see them as easy, undefended targets for a quick Line-Theft. Lo & Behold, Molly had waited till the beginning of seventh year to potion the senses out of him and get William inside of herself. The boy was born a week before the NEWT's, they had married barely a month before that. It was no surprise to anybody that Septimus had transferred what little remained of the Heir's position to Antoine, and Arthur was well shot of the useless chore.

The Family's millennial plans were far more important anyways.

Looking at a large rectangular scrying mirror that was linked to several small plugs of refined Ember crystal placed around the house and grounds, he could survey his property and kin without being seen or felt. This had been incredibly useful in the past, and led him to find out about several perfidies that had occurred under his roof and nose over the years. Thusly the secret blood tests for each of his seven children at St-Mungo's by using a copy of the client samples given to Gringotts to lock user rights for their Familial vaults and accounts.

That was why he could see that Molly was keeping herself 'productively' occupied with her two Hell-spawns. Ronald was lying on his stomach over a short wooden foot stool, pants and shorts around his lower legs, shirts up to his armpits, clamped to the bench by a 'sticking' charm applied directly to his nude belly. Molly was standing on his left side, her arm windmilling wildly as she vigorously flailed Ron's bare buttocks and thighs raw unto bleeding blisters. She was using her long runic wooden spoon that she had augmented with 'switch' and 'willowy flex' charms just for this use on her mangy brood. The fat, mad cow was straining so much from the effort of beating her youngest son into obedience and some sort of usefulness to the Prewett Plans that she was frothing at the mouth like a rabid bitch and had great streams of sweat all over her person that stained her clothes as if she had gone for a swim still dressed.

The twelve year old boy was suffering so badly that he had urinated and vomited on the floor, and he now had visible shock shivers from the trauma of the sustained assault on his defenseless person. Not that Arthur could hear him screaming or sobbing his eyes out even as he did just that, since Molly always put up a 'silence' aura on his body as she absolutely hated for anybody to interrupt her rants, no matter what their reason was. And being in horrendous pain from her tormenting him wasn't a reason she deemed valid to let him speak over her, or not listen to her shrewish scoldings delivered in rhythm to the lashings of her rod. She thought Ron deserved to be punished thus, and so he would be, and nobody's opinions counted for anything about it. As for his reactions or being traumatized, the swollen blimp filled with hate thought that it would harden him, man-him-up at long last, so he could make something of himself other than a burden on the Prewett name.

His only daughter, little Ginny, barely eleven years old, reacted to the situation exactly like the debased Prewett that she was born to be. The girl-child was visibly piddling herself in the background, both hands between her legs, clearly precociously aroused incestuously by her brother's suffering, just like her foul shrew of a gribitch mother when she was younger. Molly had often told Ginny about what a good teaching moment for girls it was to watch their brothers and cousins getting thrashed, as they could see the reality of what they would be working with later in life when they got boys of their own to handle.

Miserable, whore-spawned sluts, the both of them, and all their kindred.

Whelp, at least, that was those three problems taken care of, for now.

Besides, it wasn't like Ronald or Ginny were his children to begin with. Their biological fathers, different men at that, could come get them if they cared that much about their welfare. He wouldn't stop them, and would finally have the reason he needed to separate from the stupid group of fucktards, The Order of the Phoenix, that Dumbledore had forced him to participate in.

Sigh. "Hope springs eternal", the saying goes.

Maybe some day soon he would finally be liberated from these fraudsters and traitors.

In the meanwhile, those devilish twins were in the dilapidated wooden tool shed located across the orchard, trying to continue their potions and pranks experiments without getting caught, since their punishments at school had showed them clearly that they were not untouchable. They had seen first hand that without Dumbledore's elixir addling the minds of the populace, everybody saw them as the menial bullies they really were.

In this they took after their dead uncles Fabian and Giddeon Prewett, Molly's late brothers. It was a bloody good thing that Albus did, ordering Severus Snape to give out the addresses of their girlfriends to Voldemort, to coordinate attacks at the one moment the brothers weren't together. The two men had been firmly homophobic, and the idea of watching their sibling having sex had disgusted them greatly, to the point they couldn't even sleep with their girl if inside the same building as the other couple. So, the best time to attack them to prevent their fearsome 'Twin-Combo Strikes' was to wait until they separated willingly, when they went for their weekly booty call, in different districts of Oxford.

Nobody in Britain except Molly had cried their deaths, with even Muriel lifting a toast at the idea that she wouldn't have to endure the uncouth, loudmouthed simpletons. That, and the fact that they were the only male Prewett to hold the title of Lord in what was otherwise a matriarchal line, so the women cried in public but rejoiced in private. Even Molly, to a degree, until she realized it meant Muriel was now Lady Prewett and her boss until Molly had a daughter. That had been a weird night indeed, that particular evening.

Reading through the blood tests and paternity results, Arthur ignored Molly's deranged screams and Ron's wails of desperate agony now coming from the scrying device with studious practice. The 'silence' aura that quieted the boy had failed but Molly wasn't paying attention because she was too deep into the orgasmic portion of her lusty bellows of motherly distemper. This happened often enough that he stopped caring about that sort of scene long time ago, and his three older sons, the good ones, had learned to do so as well. Whatever the twins thought, he didn't really care unless they insisted on wasting his time to tell him without being prompted.

Yes, the hospital blood tests were clear, and Gringotts' heredity department concurred.

The House Prewett plans for hijacking several Titles and Houses in one move while insuring their continuity for at least two more generations were coming to an abrupt end soon. With their hidden benefactor having Fallen from his social positions, the Prewett were finally running out of maneuvering room and options to enact.

Plus, for the first time in fifteen decades, the House of Weasley was ascendant anew, placing themselves to finally achieve their thousand-year long quest to secure their own perennity. Soon, the legendary lands of House Potter's Claymoors, in the Scottish Lowlands, would be theirs at last, with the Titles, Ranks, Styles and Positions they carried with the Crown. Above all else, the precious Mana source hidden under the surface layers of top soil and bedrock would ensure the fertility and magical potency of House Weasley for untold centuries to come, finally giving them the social station they deserved in Gaia's hallowed name.

And if all it cost was a few bastards alongside the uppity mudblood Harry Potter, so be it.

Arthur served himself some warm tea and scones as he idly watched Molly stun and oblivitate Ronald so that he couldn't bring complaint against her to the aurors for cruelty to a pureblood wizarding child. She sent a few healing spells to his naked posteriors, one of which slathered some skin lotion from the small cauldron lying cold on the kitchen counter. The boys would wake up in his bed, thinking he had taken a nap and ignore everything else, including the smell of the lotion as it was always being brewed or used by someone on the highly rambunctious family of six sons and one tomboy daughter.

And the dumb cunt wondered WHY her son couldn't be stable or study properly...

How many times per week did she obliviate or confound him to forget all the diverse abuses she put him through?

And what were the effects of such memory charms on children younger than puberty, when their brains were clearly not developed enough to endure these spells safely?

Stupid, useless, moronic bint, her and her Prewett ilk. Sigh.

Summer vacations 1992; Dame Dagworth-Granger

(Harry Potter - theme)

July 1992  
Dagworth-Granger Manor  
Queenborough, Sheppey Island, England

Hermione Jean Dagworth-Granger stood in front of the high dressed-stone building that was the ancestral seat of her Ancient and Noble wizarding heritage, wondering how it was that her father's side of things had ever lost awareness of the relationship. Well, no; she didn't exactly have to wonder, the goblin bankers had explained everything quite clearly. It was just that the imminently logical girl couldn't accept that people were so stupid as to cut-off family members based solely on whether they had magic inside them or not. If you accepted that idiotic bigotry as a premise for social management, then it was all too easy to see what happened.

The last fully magical before Hermione had been Hector Dagworth-Granger, the founder of the Society of Most Extraordinary Potioneers, a guild that still established testing protocols, success benchmarks and training programs for the entire ICW to this day. Unfortunately, his wife and himself only gave birth to two boys who were born squibs, not bearing enough active magic in them to fulfill the Welsh Wiccan requirements for taking on the mantle of House Lordship. The goblins then applied the law to the letter; the estate was put in stasis and up-kept until an heir appeared down the line, or a thousand years had passed. It had been a bit more than three hundred years since this venerable property had been opened by anybody other than the elves employed by Gringotts to clean or renovate estates in abeyance, as per Treaty conventions.

Looking around her, Hermione could see the location was not bad. The grounds were not that large, but enough to encompass the manor's three wings, four large greenhouses, an old barn for horse carriages, a tooler's shed and potter/glazier's workshop. Roughly 1,500 feet on each side, the square property was a good chunk of real estate, nestled into the crook of the 'U' created south by Thomsett Way, west by Cullet Drive and east by the railway. The manorial grounds had been cleaned and refreshed since Hermione took the heritage tests in October 1991, as had the buildings where the heavier parts of the Family's work had taken place. Hector had reached such levels of capacity in his sciences that he needed to make his own tools and glasswares for the laboratories or nothing brewed came out right.

Taking a deep breath, the young girl looked at the man standing besides her, Roland Holtzberth, her personal secretary & driver, getting from him a nod to go forth, that everything would be alright. It was her home now, after all. The goblins wouldn't have cleared the transfer or given her the keys and ward instructions if it weren't her rightful property. Hermione's fears were put to rest as the monumental main door was opened by her newly found house-elf matron, Tinny. To see the elf present on the property, ready to serve, was the best and most solid proof that Hermione could get that the estate really belonged to her. The elves would never forcibly enter a property that didn't belong to their House, and would not try to take over the duties of those elves who lived and served here already.

Walking forth up the massive stone stairs that were flanked by fountains crafted as giant gurgling potion bottles in honor of the Family's crafts, trade and arts, she entered what would be her home and seat of power for the remainder of her life. Unlike her predecessors who had gotten kicked out of their rightful ancestral domain by bigots and Welsh Wiccan religious fanatics, Hermione had worked with Gringotts to modernize her financial holdings. She had deposed the hereditary lands and businesses into an incorporated foundation whose purpose was the upkeep, care and maintenance of the Dagworth-Granger Line, including all squibs and muggles that may result. Having magic would no longer be the sole criteria for being part of the House and Family; Blood, soul, and a drive to improve the health of the nation would be how her kin would be judged and admitted or refused.

The cruel, toothy smile her account manager had gifted her told the girl she had done right.

Then again, the gobsmacked looks on Draco, Nymphadora and Susan had been well worth it, while poor Neville had asked in wonder "That can be done legally? Since when?". And Harry Bloody Potter had been choking himself in laughter at all their expenses, of course. Damned brat! What did she see in him anyways? Oh yeah... He was her first friend... Sucks to be her...

Smirking silently at her errant thoughts, Hermione followed the small elf as she proudly guided the new Lady of the Wizengamot on a grand tour of the manor's most important areas. Being raised in a very status-aware and business-minded household, she could easily guess the value and rarity of the many works of art, furniture and tapestries that adorned the corridors and rooms they passed. On solid assets alone she was loaded like a bloody oil tanker on the open seas.

x----------x

The manor was built in three main wings connected by the basements and at each floor above ground, planned on the old principle that servants were beneath the masters.

The central wing had a large kitchen, pantries and root cellars in the basement level; a great dining hall, reception hall and den on the ground floor; the master's offices and library were on the first floor; the children's schoolroom, limited library and large game room on the second floor; and the attic.

The Family was located in the left wing, with a small kitchen, pantries and root cellar in the basement; reserved formal dining room, public brunch room that opened towards the rear garden, Master's den and Dame's boudoir on the ground floor; masters' and adults' rooms on the first floor; children's rooms and nursery on the second floor; and the attic.

The servants lived in the right wing of the estate, the basement being pantries and cellars throughout; large kitchen and open-plan hall with zones for dining, living and games; adult and teenaged servants were roomed on the first floor; children and babies of the older servants roomed on the second floor, with a dedicated nursery room; then the attic.

Hermione was impressed by the sheer size and majesty of the old manor, having seen some on television but never truly visited one before. The few times that her parents had taken her to visit influential clients or partners that lived near them, the homes had all been less than a century old, and none were close to the size of this property. Honestly, Hermione felt like a princess as she sat in what was now her private boudoir, in the Family wing's ground floor. She grumbled playfully about not being so prone to childish pouting that she needed a 'boudoir' like some précieuse from the Renaissance, much to the amusement of her two servants.

Servants.

Egads, Mother Gaia, help your poor daughter, she needs you!

Just how many people would she need to hire to handle this beast of an estate? And could she get the potions labs and tool workshops back in business to generate cash? Would the permits have lapsed or been voided since the domain was in stasis? She would need immediate assistance from Gringotts, and she had no trouble imagining the toothy grin her account manager would give her as she tried to wrestle this dragon into shape. Well, as her parents had taught her from a young age, when they were home to speak with her; "Pour enough money, men and time on a situation and it will get fixed as you want it to be. Just be patient, firm and very rich, otherwise get ready to do everything by yourself until it gets better."

x----------x

Looking at the fresh pieces of mail that had been routed from Gringotts' secured mail screening service, a vital godsend in her social situation, Hermione was reminded again that becoming a titled Lady at age 12 was not in anyways fun. The thick parchment envelope with the plum and gold crest of the British Wizengamot certainly foreshadowed the writer's cramp she'd have before going to bed tonight. Blasted paperwork! Of all the aberrations of the many worlds, why was this particular depravity the one thing that Hades couldn't kill and sent into the Beyond?

Speaking of Hades, she had to ask Harry how to summon one of those highly practical deathly midgets to help care for her gardens and greenhouses. The quality of the stuff she had tasted and tested in her potions that came from his portable trunk was exquisite. Neville had been green with vegetative envy, and Draco had tried all year to secure exclusive rights of purchase, only to get threatened with being cursed into Ent form by Neville, if he ever succeeded in cutting off their friendly pseudo-druid from his god-brother's produce.

The smell of freshly brewed tea and the chink of porcelain brought the maudlin girl back to her senses, and promptly made her tear up as she saw the antique Dagworth-Granger tea set, proudly bearing the House crest on all pieces. Tinny handed her mistress a cup, already fixed as the girl enjoyed, then presented a plate of small vanilla cupcakes, mocha cakes, almond financiers, chocolate successes, and small field fruit tartlets. The elf had cooked her first official meal in the wing's kitchen, and was stressing out that her mistress would find it lacking.

Instead, the young Lady took a page from her friend Harry's grimoire, inviting both employees to sit by her side to share the snacks during a conversation about what she hoped to accomplish in this estate. The weeping house-elf had to take a few minutes to steady herself as she served Roland, but had no choice about sitting with them like an equal as Hermione insisted, affecting a monarchic air with her head turned to the side, nose in the air as she commanded "I will it so." to the emoting elf who had never been treated so kindly in her life. The 20 year old male kept a tight hold of his tongue, lest he make a mess of things, but he thought his new boss was so cute it was to die for.

The friendly, honest conversation lasted until slightly passed the normal lunch hour, giving Hermione time to write down her first lists of jobs and questions about everything that was being set in motion with the awakening of the estate. She would take the afternoon to tour the workshops and expansive gardens fully, then retreat to the Family wing for an early dinner. Then she would update her lists and prepare for her meeting at Gringotts tomorrow morning.

Yes, her accountant would be grinning toothily indeed. Surely, that was a good thing, yes?

Summer vacations 1992; Gringotts' not got any goblins grinning

(Harry Potter - theme)

July 1992  
Gringotts Wizarding Bank  
Diagon Alley, London, England

King Ragnok Backsnapper was a most baleful sight as he sat regally upon the small throne behind his desk, his armored formal suit gleaming in contrast to the opaque white of ivory in his mouth as he grinned widely and cruelly at the many account managers assembled before him.

It was wizard hunting season again.

Every few years, the humans died off in droves as their short-lived kind were wont of doing, due mostly to the very fragile biology of their bodies and even weaker minds. This wasn't helped by their stupid refusal to see the signs that Gaia had given them, and then compounded by some fools thinking that copulation between germane cousins was a solution. The marriage of Orion Black and Walburga Black despite being direct cousins was a prime example of what depravities came from such. Sirius Orion Black III had been unstable and near maniac from birth, exhibiting clear symptoms of bipolar ailments. Regulus Arcturus Black had escaped being on the Asperger Syndrome Spectrum by the width of a hair, but had been almost slavish in his devotion and obedience towards any adult around him, lacking autonomy or self-interests, including survival.

It was a good thing that House Black had jumped across the divide to be Headed by Harry Potter, since the boy had fresher Blood and modern outlooks on society and magic, without sacrificing the vital parts of the Old Ways and High Traditions of the Darkes. It was a welcome sight, after the last four centuries of methodical self-inflicted injuries and déchéance that the wizards had put themselves through. No matter how much he would like to blame a single man, Dumbledore alone could not have committed all this, and many of the problems were well entrenched in the humans' collective habits before he was born. No, there were still problems to clean out, but the installment of Lord Potter and Lady Dagworth-Granger were good first steps towards resolution.

Turning towards one of the oldest managers, Ragnok asked "What is the condition of Heir Presumptive Longbottom? Lord Potter has shared a few interesting memories under the cover of confidentiality that I asked be investigated. So has Lady Dagworth-Granger just after her elevation to her Title. What have you found?"

Snarling in disdain, the senior account manager for House Longbottom growled menacingly "That vapid, second tier Rosier bitch wannabee has indeed caused physical and mental injuries to the Heir of the house that she married into. Furthermore, she allowed her brother-in-law and his own birth brother to commit worse attacks and offenses, going so far as to let the harm happen inside the halls of Longbottom Manor. In many cases, the brother-by-alliance, Algernon Croaker, went so far as to countermand educational or upkeep instructions that Lord Franklin had written into his will for the care of his only child. Augusta Rosier did nothing to stop this, or set the man back in his proper place."

Growling his own anger, the senior account manager for House Peverell mumbled "It seems that the old crone is still pining after Augusta after all these years. Two false accusations, a trial for defamation and abuse of power, loss of Title and House Seat, and five decades haven't in any ways made the fool think with anything but his flesh-wand. Both Croaker brothers are too old to have children, and were cursed during the Walpurgisnacht Hegemony, under Grindelwald, so they can't reproduce. And Lord Francis Longbottom destroyed their Family crypt when he was given their ancestral manorial estate as compensation for their crimes, thus cutting off adoption by ritual. I sense despair, and a vain attempt at gaining some vengeance on their way out of this world."

Ragnok replied "Suicidal men with no kin or riches to hold them back are dangerous, like a wounded mother dragon that just watched its eggs get stomped. They will lash out anywhere, at anybody nearby, without rhyme or reason other than a desire to cause harm. In many ways, this will be worse than Dumbledore, who at least wanted something to rule over. These two want nothing but ashes and broken dreams to float in their wake. Watch them. Discretely, but watch them closely and seriously. I will not have damages done to some of our nation's most promising allies and clients. And begin an audit of the entire Longbottom holdings."

The senior account manager for St-Mungo's hospital cleared his throat, saying "We make these decisions at an opportune time, majesty. I have begun receiving troubling news from the healers in the hospital. Many had been drugged or mind-raped by Dumbledore to do illegal, or flat out inhumane, things to the patients under their care. Among the victims are the Lord and Lady of House Longbottom. The aurors have discovered that Franklin and Alice could in fact be healthy and mobile, but have been kept artificially insane or comatose at the behest of Dumbledore to establish and maintain control over Heir Neville, as he did with Lord Potter."

"What new information I bring is that this was known to the aurors many months ago, yet the couple remain insensate, under the foul medications that Dumbledore had created. My team has traced the orders for this perfidy all the way to the office of Saul Croaker, widower of the late Felicia Rosier, younger sister of Augusta Rosier, the current Dowager and Regent of House Longbottom. The orders were signed by Croaker under a 'hidden codicile' protocol to make it a state secret just after Augusta visited him in the Department of Mysteries in January 1992. The documents bear the Sigil of Longbottom Regency, thus proving that the woman knows the true states of her son and daughter-in-law, yet keeps them ailing so as to keep hold of the House for herself, and for the pair of treasonous bastards that support her."

King Ragnok was incensed beyond words, so he took a long pull from his goblet of grog, instead of shouting profanities at his underlings. They were competent and assiduous, the faults were not theirs to assume. Shaking a long clawed finger at the manager in charge of the Welsh Wiccan sect's medical facility, he decreed "I don't care what we have to reveal to the muggle Crown, or even the Wizengamot, about our methods or the true complexity of the Treaty that unites us with the Britannic Realms since Camelot was established as the seat of English monarchy. Find every last scrap of physical proof you can about the depravities committed by the Unspeakables under Dumbledore and after his arrest, and use the Longbottom case as spearhead to ram through any objections any of their bureaucratic sycophants could put up. And be ready to release the entire file to the foreign media across the ICW, Africa and Asia. It served us the first time when we got Sirius Black released from Azkaban, it will serve us again this time, no matter what the Ministry's diplomatic eructations will be."

"Speaking of the idiotic Welsh Ministry," asked the senior manager for the Black accounts, "Have they finally held an election to garnish the higher positions liberated by the traitors' deaths? I have heard nothing, and neither have my sources, which I find worrisome."

Everybody looked towards the goblin in charge of speaking with the Ministry through official channels, the human Department of 'Creature Liaisons', named to tell themselves that all other species were not full entities with intelligence and culture, just mere 'creatures'.

The ambassador shook his head negatively, saying "I can't even access the Ministry building, my liege. The special Floo reserved for Gringotts priority affairs has been shut down on their end of the network. Further, when I tried to enter via the visitors' public lobby, the wand-tester guards declared that all goblins had been barred from the edifice until ordered otherwise. The young noobs didn't even know who gave the orders, or if they had the authority since there is no minister in place, and they shrugged off my questions as not their pay grade or problem."

The Peverell senior manager sneered "I smell a blood-worm crawling around the plumbing of their House. It looks like another Manipulator is risen to usurp their government. I wonder if Amelia Bones is aware?" He contemplated aloud, as he fingered the blade of his serrated dagger.

Ragnok pounded the armrest of his throne, declaring "Make them aware! We need some semblance of order in that madhouse! The Welsh Wiccan congregation is collapsing like a mine shaft dug in mud without caissons! We cannot keep business afloat in circumstances like these, that will expedite civil unrest in the other magical communities or groups."

Aiming a beringed, clawed digit at the official ambassador to Buckingham Palace, he ordered "Get the queen in on it! She said she'd handle her own kind, then let her! We have enough in our tunnels to worry about, we don't need to hand-hold humanity too! Now get out!"

{ HP } --- { Harruda Winesour } --- { HP }

A small goblin, barely adolescent by the skin color that was more green than gray, arrived at speed, kneeling by the desk of his king in a panic. "Majesty! She marches! The Grand Dame, Harruda Winesour, Lady Dowager of the Goblin Realm, marches for the Arena of Debate!"

Suddenly up and sprinting towards a hidden alcove, Ragnok shouted profanities as he slapped the glowing Ember gem that triggered the teleportation plate. At least the ride was much smoother than anything the humans had created, due to their limited senses and comprehension of basal physics and Planar Domains. The goblin king arrived in the official throne room of the nation's governing seat with barely enough time to spare to properly use switching spells to change clothes and sit on the massive stone throne overlooking the Arena.

The name to the space was due to their warrior culture, but was in fact just a shallow stone bowl, barely three feet deep, set in the middle of the governors' pulpits that were assembled in an oval on a single tier. The servants and scribes had a ten foot wide passageway behind the pulpits to circulate messages, bring food, or try to assassinate the unworthy with some freedom of movement for the fight to happen.

Yes, duels happened in the Arena too, it had been built that way for a reason, but it was mostly just a processional alley for petitioners to enter, make their presentation while being physically and psychologically just a bit inferior and lower than their audience, and leave by the only door available. The Arena also held the two greatest magical relics entrusted to the goblins of Britain; the Well of Souls and the Altar of Gruumsh One-Eye.

The twenty-six governors of the goblin nation were finally assembled, with mere breaths to spare as the processional gates began to groan open, letting in the ceremonial musics that accompanied the old crone on her march across the subterranean realm. The torches around the lip of the arena and the rear of the service passage lit of their own volition, while the Ember bulbs in the ceiling and pulpits dimmed down to less than 2% glow.

At the end of the Arena, far from the raised dais where Ragnok's throne sat, entered a procession of four goblins who chilled the blood and soul of every being in the debate hall, no matter who they were, or what they did for a career.

The three smaller entities were goblin teenagers, their skins green with splotches of rock gray that indicated the onset of puberty had taken properly. The youths were a female at the front and two boys at the rear, thusly forming an escort triangle to surround the adult female in the middle. The teens were bare except for loincloths, wearing silver chains with fetishes and amulets at their wrists and ankles that clinged softly as they moved. Their necks displayed a gold torque struck with the Sigil of their mistress, showing publicly their tasks and destiny in magic and life. The girl in front carried a mist-gray taper atop a five foot tall sconce-staff. The boy on the left held a great holy book against his chest. The boy to the right held a long silver chain that had a censer on one end but an offering plate at the other.

The elderly female in the middle was ancient, being twice Ragnok's age at slightly passed 700 years of life. She was wrinkled all over, though most of it was hidden by her tunic, soft boots and short fingerless gloves that exposed her cruelly wicked claws for all to see. A massive headdress composed of a circlet of wrought dragon scales and augurey feathers prominently displayed a small skull on the front, from some unknown entity that had been sacrificed many centuries ago.

This female was Harruda Winesour, great-grand-mother of Ragnok through his mother's mother, and chief priestess of Gruumsh One-Eye, the Living God of kobolds, goblinoids, orcoids, ogrin and trolls. She was a fearsome entity whose wisdom defied understanding, and her reach into the Outer Planes of existence stretched the sanity of any who dared speak with her about her arts.

Above all else, Winesour was the only Haruspex in the entire goblin nation who wasn't just a glorified butcher with a tipple of sight to justify gutting poor animals like that. She could actually cut open a living being and keep them alive and conscious for the ritual, then heal them with such potent prayers and unctions that only a single silvery scar remained of the event. She was also the only professional diviner amongst three dozen organized societies to have both Oracular Talents granted by Gruumsh and Prophetic Gifts granted by the Youggian deity Daoloth, He Who Rends the Veils of Reality.

She KNEW truths none dared even imagine whilst in the throes of intoxication, and had used these deleterious powers to help guide the goblin peoples of Britain towards a safer, more stable future since her Gifts had awakened. She was for their kin what the catholic pope had been to his church, before his God died in glorious Holy War against the Denarians, 900 years ago.

All the governors stayed seated, as did Ragnok. She was the petitioner here, not them. At least, that was the official protocol. None of the rulers assembled would dare challenge her, nor her altar servants, unless they were hearing the Call of Hades in the far away.

Harruda Winesour stood straight as a soldier's halberd, despite the centuries. Besides her skin, it was as if Time was either unable to touch her, or afraid to do so. Rumors abounded of what she did to stay so spry and mobile at her age, but none were ever confirmed. Every goblin alive knew that it could only involve Blood-Magick; only a blind fool would think otherwise. As for how she got the blood and what she actually did with it, nobody really wanted to know that much.

The Haruspex raised her clawed finger at her royal descendant, commanding loudly "Open the Well of Souls! We be casting the Wyrd, this day!"

A grumble of nasty surprise swept the governors, since the use of Wyrd Mastery was a tightly restricted practice that few even knew about. The spell-list itself was almost a Holy Relic and few were those who dared to mention its existence in such an open forum. Then again, standing besides the Well of Souls was hardly a better place either, for conversing of these esoteric topics.

Ragnok swung his mighty battle-ax against the iron gong that hung besides his throne, causing the red flames in the torches to suddenly change to the blue & white of spirit flames as powerful wards against incorporeal, elemental, spiritual and undead entities wrapped around the hall. In the Arena, near the Altar of Gruumsh, at the foot of the royal dais, the stone floor folded downwards, letting the way clear for a mechanism to raise the miniature ritual circle and its focal point. The twenty foot wide stone slab had a fifteen foot wide circle of stone pillars in the form of a cromlech, with a shallow stone well in the middle.

The Well of Souls was barely two feet wide, but its true Power was revealed as the circular stone plug that covered its mouth was levitated out of the ritual area, being set down on its side near the entry of the Arena. From the Well emerged an electric-blue torrent of negative energy, rising up to the ceiling where it connected with a circle of scriptworkes that dephased a segment of the stone structure to allow the raw soul-stuff to return to the Soul Weave without damaging the sacred edifice and debate hall.

Harruda Winesour walked passed her female servant to step unto the shallow dais, entering the mobile cromlech to plunge her hands directly into the stream of condensed ectoplasm that was the physical manifestation of the Soul Weave. She splayed her long fingers, caressing the individual lines of souls like an angelic bard playing on a majestic harp in Heaven. Immediately, the millions of souls were known to her, accessible to her senses, understood by her mind and magicks as if they were mere extensions of her body, waiting to reveal the entirety of their existences to her. She probed with infinite care the filaments of ectoplasm, searching for what her God Daoloth had spoken through her in Prophecy.

There! She had found the nexus she sought.

A powerful Gordian Knot had been sundered, letting the Souls pass freely again, but several smaller knots still remained. The work was incomplete, but progressing apace. She now knew what to do, and why it was needed.

Gazing balefully upon Ragnok, she ordered "Bring me the last thief to have been caught inside the bank! Even if he's just a skeleton!" Making a vague gesture of dismissal, she mumbled tartly "There are ways around such trifling inconveniences as sacrifices that aren't quite fresh."

Ragnok glowered at the entire assembly of governors, howling "Get her the damned thief or you'll be the ones getting gutted on the altar! Now!" He sat back on his throne, stroking his chin with long clawed digits as he contemplated the significance of the Haruspex attending the Well of Souls of her own volition. Surely the Living Gods were behind this, which never boded good for their people when such beings decided to play with mortal lives as entertainment.

{ HP } --- { Prophecy of The Grand Reaping } --- { HP }

The Grand Seer, Lady Dowager Harruda Winesour, stood in meditation besides the ethereal blue column of the ectoplasmic stream, waiting for the basic materials of her trade to be brought. She was Gifted with Prophetic Views and Talented in Oracular Sight, but her most basic competency was in the traditional divinatory method known as the 'augury', the reading of living viscera and fluids. This of course required at least a living animal, but worked better on much more magical and intelligent creatures. The ancient legends spoke of mythical Seers that had performed readings on the still beating hearts of dragons or phoenixes, after besting the beings in single combat to earn from Mystra and Gaia the right to peer into The Void Between Realities.

Harruda had no intention of desecrating such magnificent beings for a trivial purpose, especially when she was already convinced that the conclusion of the ritual was foregone well passed the capacities of mortals to affect. No, what she sought was confirmation, and a clear path through the incoming maelstrom for their nation. War was upon them, and they would survive she knew this, but in what shape? And would they be on the winning or losing side of the conflict?

Trying not to let the governors see her worries was an incredible act of willpower. She had lived for slightly over seven centuries, knowing from an early age that all her education, training and experiences in occultism and divinatory arts would be for this day, in this event. Daoloth had showed her, before puberty started, what her end would be. It was the very first time that she had rent the Veils of Reality, peering whence no mortal soul should ever look. She had committed the Unspeakable that day, and nearly the Anathema as well, but the wisdom and Power obtained had justified everything she had lived since.

A silent pulse of magic from her female acolyte warned her that a soldier had brought the materials necessary for her ritual. Opening her dark yellow eyes to focus her acidic gaze upon the armored peon, she sneered at the condition of the offering. Bone flecks in a wooden shoe box and a glowing blue Lorne sphere on top. Egads, but she was surrounded by knaves! Hadn't they been tutored in WHY all thieves caught inside Gringotts had to be put in stasis for a century after the first part of their sentence had been applied? It was because she needed them fresh, dammit!

Sneering mightily at the metal-clad male fool, she cast a mere cantrip to rip the box out of his weak, fearfully shaking hands, sending it to the offering plate dangling from the censer chain of her male acolyte. A toothy smirk informed the soldier of the price of his incompetence just as well as words, as he tried desperately to pull out his sword to defend his life. He shouldn't have bothered, as Winesour called forth The Large Legendary Bone Rattle of Vaudooun, holding the relic staff with both hands as she shook it vigorously towards her chosen -fresh- sacrifice. The cruel staff was composed of goblin femurs for the barrel, a troll fingernail for the foot point, and a dwarf skull at the top that still had all his hair and beard with the jewels in them. From under the skull, where the staff jointed with the head, a crown of eight skeletal undead baby basilisks unfurled and moved, animated by sulfurous hate and perverted wills.

Shaking the eight foot staff like an oversized baby rattle, the Haruspex cursed the useless soldier with bodily feebleness, addling of the mind and befuddling of the senses. Then she let the staff's insidious illusionary Powers penetrate his Inner-World to capture his mind, trapping it so that he became as rigid as a wrapped mummy, held fast from within by his own corrupted will. As the fool male was dropping to the floor, the baby basilisks extended several dozen feet to effortlessly grab the fresh meat in motion, pick it up and move it physically to rest atop the Altar of Gruumsh the One-Eyed Hunter. Harruda retracted the snakes and dismissed the staff like a soiled teacup, no longer interested in whatever foul gossips the poisonous worms wanted to spew at her. She had important work before her, and time was wasting.

Shedding all her clothing except for the ceremonial headdress, the elderly crone stood covered in naught but glowing scarification's that glistened with lambent Power all over her wrinkled skin. She opened the front relief panel on the altar to reveal a hidden tabernacle where the Holy items of Gruumsh were stored between prayers and rituals. Taking up the obsidian athame, silver chalice and many drab gray stoneware offering plates, she set them in the prescribed pattern around the table-top of the altar. Her acolytes began to sing in the background, casting mental and spiritual protections upon her to anchor her Self in the Here & Now, so that she could let her magicks sail forth on the eddies and tides of Probabilities & Potentials.

Working her dexterous fingers with skills a surgeon would cry for, the old woman used quick, short, economical strikes of the obsidian blade to sever straps, cords and buttons off the paralyzed soldier's armor and base clothes. Once everything was separated, she cast a simple auto-packing spell to send everything near the Arena entrance in a neat pile for his family to receive at the end of the day. Running her calloused, wrinkled hands over his entire body to memorize his particular details, she also absorbed his soul-aura and effluves, learning to detach his signature from the background noises and important tones in the Weaves and Spheres.

Cutting through living goblin skin as if she were opening a menial letter from the bank, Harruda peeled off the epidermis of the torso to expose the flesh of the thorax and abdomen, so she could separate the meat along its natural seams and points of attachment. Removing cuts of meat from the rib-cage, she unveiled the beating heart and flexing diaphragm then opened the lower guts to her view. Augury was done mostly with the bowels, but in this case, she would need to examine all organs in the torso to be sure of her results. Reading the brain was a waste of time, as it was irremediably contaminated by the memories, mind and magicks of the entity to such degree that believing anything she saw would be sheer madness.

Setting the bloody athame aside, she cast several personal hygiene and salubrity wards to protect herself from any nasty surprises that might be lying in wait inside the soft organs, especially the intestines. Several types of worms, spiders and giant amoeba truly despised being bothered from their hot, wet nesting spot, and would sortie quite violently when disturbed by outside forces. The goblin society had learned to vaccinate against such nuisances, but you never knew when some idiot would go out to a wild area to hunt and camp rough to test their mettle against Gaia. It was a very poorly trained Haruspex, Biomancer or Necromancer that got caught unawares by these kinds of little beasties.

Luckily, no heathen creature dwelt in the bowels or stomach, so she could perform the augury without perturbations. Carefully sliding her fingers around the warm, slick tubes of flesh, the old crone felt her magic leaking into the membranes and cells, causing a resonance that brought back the informations she craved. Her hands registered the faint echoes of magic, sending them to her core and mind to be processed until they appeared as intelligible images, sounds, odors and concepts that bore meaning to her frail goblin mind. Having passed the entire intestinal tract from anus to stomach, she palped the large sack, observing the veins and nerves, and the small pustules that indicated a slow disease about to become active.

A sign of truly bad things to come, if ever there was.

Inspecting the pustules, she recoiled in horror as she saw that they were actually small amniotic sacks, each holding a minute insectoid creature that was slowly maturing. She knew these things, had dreaded their emergence in this Plane of existence as they understood nothing and had no culture, being only animals similar to locusts, but more voracious and poisonous too. Quickly, she perverted a spell, using a 'looting dweomer' to rip out all the immature larvae from the still living host after thinking of them as 'precious commodities' to fool the spell into grabbing living entities instead of material riches. A quick flick of the hand had the insects dead and sterilized to prevent cellular division or accidental unleashing of seed from the corpses. She put them in a stoneware plate, covering the dish with wards and repulsion charms to keep any but the nation's best apothecaries and biomancers from accessing them.

Moving from the stomach, she palped upwards along the esophagus, finding tumors and lesions where the original parasite had crawled down to lay its eggs. Devoid of intellect or desires save consumption and reproduction, the foul thing had done its deed and died, then falling to the stomach were it was digested by the acid like any other shrimp or crab. She had no idea how this simpleton could have been exposed to a pest from an Outer Plane, unless he had dealings with a Planewalker or some merchant who sailed the Styx on a heavily ensorcelled ship. Reaching the mouth, she saw that the tongue and glands were normal, but the smell was slightly rancid, which could be discerned only by bringing her long nose within an inch of the male's teeth.

Returning to the thorax, she palped the liver, feeling its spongy structure and the irregular texture caused by minute nodules, irritations resulting from the parasitic larvae spreading toxins in his blood for several weeks already. She cut the organ to peer inside, recoiling as a thin wet tentacle emerged from the opening to feel the air around, soon followed by a small crustacean that looked like a crawfish, but with a face full of slimy purple tentacles and no pincers. A carrion crawler! The poor fool had become contaminated by carrion crawler eggs! How did this ever get so deep into his body functions that the beastie grew in the liver? Especially since these things preferred dead, rotten flesh to anything warm and still pulsating. Grasping the offending thing with a quick spell, she dropped in into a stoneware plate and secured it under stasis and wards, like the insects. The specialists could look it over, in case it was a new sub-race of the known species.

Placing her hands around the lungs, she palped them, immediately feeling that they were more rigid than normal, and partially filled with heavy fluid in the lower portion. Girding herself, she used a 'Syringe of Force' spell to remove the fluid into a stoneware plate, swirling and sloshing the foul thing like a prospector panning for gold nuggets. What she found was microscopic traces of heavy metal, a radioactive isotope found only in Youggoth, the chaotic realm of the most primitive and barbaric divinities and societies known to them that Peer into the Void. The cretin had been in contact with beings from another dimension often enough, and from close enough, to have eaten their food to absorb their native isotopes, and to become a vector for their parasites. Whether that one was an accident, willful bio-sabotage, or the result of unprotected inter-species copulation, it could only be told by the fool's soul, whence the augury was finished.

Ignoring the damaged lungs as they held nothing further, Harruda concentrated on the heart, seeing the enlarged veins, discolored from straining against infections and defective lungs that were not sending enough air to the organs and brain. Carefully, she used the 'Syringe of Force' to bleed dry the soldier, emptying his veins and heart into a stoneware plate, setting the fluid aside for the investigators to sift and study later. She was not surprised to find that his heart was badly damaged from being clogged with partially developed carrion crawler larvae that, while not awakened yet, numbered in the hundreds and clogged the ventricles, making the muscle work against itself as well as all the other defects and ailments.

She had her vision.

She had Seen what was coming.

She had confirmation; and dark and evil though it was, a needed thing it was.

She could caution her kingdom of the impending doom, so they prepared for the storm.

Emerging from her trance, Harruda Winesour raised a clawed hand over the butchered mess that used to be a soldier of her nation, and cast 'Habeas Lorneum Sphericum', capturing the idiot's soul inside a glowing blue Lorne sphere, to be set amongst the other samples collected.

Done with the fleshes of her sacrifice, Harruda turned to the Well of Souls, still crusted with congealing blood and reeking of rancid offal. She walked up the three shallow steps to stand besides the lip of the stone well, thrusting both soiled hands into the stream of ectoplasm, using the remaining life-force and magic in the sacrificial blood to fuel the connection. Once in full contact with the ebb and eddies of the Soul Weave, she let her Third Eye open, entreating her most basal and primitive deity, Daoloth, Render of the Veils who dwelleth in Youggoth, to gently move aside the curtain of lies and platitudes that shielded ordinary mortals from the fundamental truths of Reality and the Multiverse.

To King Ragnok and the governors, it appeared as if Harruda Winesour had suddenly immolated in spirit flames as her entire naked body combusted, the flesh cremating so fast that it looked like a Lichtenberg luminograph for a few seconds as the wet organic parts burned from within. As the last remnants of mortal flesh decayed to essential salts falling to the floor besides the Well, the skeletal figure moved to face the king on his dais. The spirit flame wreathed undead thing raised an imperious clawed hand towards Ragnok, warning aloud in a harsh ethereal whisper:

"Beware the Dark Clouds that part at the rising of the Sun! Beware the Brightness that sears the eyes that look upon its magnificence! Beware, ye fools that would see behind the Light, to gaze upon the raw Truths hidden from weaklings and knaves! But take no comforts in your ignorance, for hiding in dank caverns and dressed-stone crypts will no longer save you! Fleeing before the rising Tide will not more make it recede away from the town wharves! And it doth come, the Tide of storms and clouds and lightning! In grand fanfares, marching to the beat of drums and horns, chanted on the lips of curs and slaves driven by whips and madness! The Grand Reaping of the Unworthy hath cometh to Earth, and the Bleak Swarm hungereth for thine blood!"

In a grandiose gout of spirit flames, the Lady Dowager Harruda Winesour, great-grand-mother of the seated king of the goblin nation became one with Infinity and the wisdom of her God. Her bones cremated to essential salts, falling down to mingle with the rest of her dust pile besides the Well.

Ragnok Backsnapper, 471st king of the goblins of Britain resumed it all quite well: "Ah fucks!"

Summer vacations 1992; brotherhood

(Harry Potter - theme)

August 1992  
#12 Grimmauld Place  
London, The Britannic Realms

Kreacher appeared next to Harry with a soft popping sound, careful not to disturb the boy as he was practicing new spells that he had acquired. The old tome on the Witch Hunter techniques used by the Grimm Hunters for centuries under the aegis of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church was yet another flea-market find. The handful of galleons paid in Knockturn District for this and four other smaller books of Dark lores had been a worthwhile investment, especially since the books were either out of print or banned by the Welsh Wiccan Ministry. The fact that Harry had also checked in the inventories of all three Houses he managed and didn't find them made the purchases all the more attractive to him. That, and anything that broke the Welsh sect's mindless censorship of anything that proved their inbred bureaucrats didn't rule the world was good in his grimoire.

Thankfully, Harry was in the process of reading and testing the divinations and analytics spells from the lists, so there were no dangers of explosive backlash, just information overload. Setting the ancient volume aside, he gave Kreacher his undivided attention.

"Master Harry be needings to know that Heir Neville Longbottom be hurting. He bees alone in small inn, not far from here. Kreacher heard his call for help. Does master Harry want Kreacher to bring the boy into the House of Black?"

Shaking his head angrily, Harry replied "No! It could be a trap, with Neville being used as bait to breach the wards. Since the house has become invisible, four different attempts to spot us have occurred, and there have been watchers on the rooftops around the plaza five more times. We are rarely alone anymore, Kreacher, and that's why I always use the Floo or mirror-gate to leave the estate."

Summoning his battle kit, Harry used a quick switching spell to change from his comfortable indoor clothes to the hardened black and purple combat robes he had crafted for those situations when he could foresee that a big fight was coming. "Jippsy! Come to me! Kreacher, you will stay in the House of Black and control the wards to repel invaders or remote sensors. The amulet I crafted to give you authority over the systems should be stable enough for now. It's a stop-gap measure at best, but for now we don't have any alternatives. Jippsy, you'll be following me under invisibility and unpresence effects, to intervene only if I'm in danger beyond my capacity to defend against. I don't want any enemies to realize that I'm accompanied by you or you'll become a target right away."

Shrinking his trunk and placing the locket at his neck, the 12 year old child pressed two glyphs on his robes that temporarily changed their appearance into a set of lightweight summer muggle clothes without diminishing the mystical defenses. A single thought would revert their physical shape back to fighting standards, if needs be. Marching to the Floo, Harry made sure to take the expensive but oh-so-practical untraceable powder from the appropriate urn then triggered the chimney to send him to the public Floo in King's Cross train station. The inn Neville had chosen was halfway between Grimmauld Place and the station, so it changed nothing in terms of travel time, but it was safer because he had less chances of being followed.

"I will use the Lord's ring portkey to get us to Gringotts to have him looked over and Floo back from there. I will call by mirror if anything important or dramatic arises." The child stated before stepping into the blazing green flames of the Floo network.

x----------x

Harry's simple tactic of not leaving by the front door bypassed the two watchers illegally placed on the roofs around Grimmauld Place to find his point of origin if he moved by foot. The treasonous Unspeakables still hadn't been able to map out a perimeter small enough to say where the house was situated inside the zone. The Black Blood-Wards were pumping out an interference wave that wrecked long-range divinations, the underage Wand Trace and Floo tracking charms up to two miles out, so the criminals had to resort to primitive methods to eyeball the boy's movements. Except that he usually passed by Gringotts or the public chimneys in Diagon and Hedgerow to drown his magical signature and Floo-line in the innumerable transits that passed by those hubs.

None of the arithmancers in the Department of Mysteries had yet been able to create an algorithm that would scan and eliminate the unwanted noises and excess signals from the report, so they had to place permanent monitoring devices at those public hubs to have a chance to tag the brat with a tracer. Except that even when one of their agents did manage to find and tag the boy, he always passed by Gringotts to get cleansed before heading home, using the goblins' Floo to leave the bank building, thus becoming anonymous anew.

Saul Croaker was becoming irritated at finding so many damned flaws and weaknesses in their tracking grid, but couldn't do anything as the Departmental budget had been cut in half due to not having any minister in post for nearly seven months by now. With the entire Welsh Wiccan executive and Wizengamot beheaded as they were, the Queen had used her Imperial prerogative to freeze all forms of new projects, department initiatives or spending beyond basic upkeep. The muggle bint wanted nothing to happen until all the vacant seats in the Gamot hall were filled and the new Ministry execs were oathed correctly into position. Only then would the Ministry be open for business again. The Department of Mysteries did have a few secret slush funds hidden elsewhere than among the Welsh sect businesses or banks, but that money would now serve the Croaker Brothers to escape, if they survived the coming conflict with Longbottom and Potter.

It wouldn't be long now.

x----------x

Harry emerged safely from the King's Cross public Floo hearth, brushing off the soot as he walked away. Passing the muggle repelling & illusion barrier, he seamlessly merged with the flow of mundanes that swarmed the station at this time of the morning. He left the station by the doorway that oriented best towards his destination, stopping by a bistro to buy easy yet comforting food for two hearty meals, in case he found what he was expecting when he reached Neville.

The child maintained mental contact with Rehz as he walked, the Faerie Drake remaining hidden inside the trunk as an immediate backup, if it came bad enough to need that. His eyes were systematically panning around and up as he advanced, showing just how used to facing threats in an urban environment he was for his young age. Sneering in disdain at the unbidden memory, the boy really hoped he wouldn't be accosted by a pervert or drug pusher. He was already in a bad mood, any sort of confrontation would only end lethally for the fool who challenged him.

Harry's sneer of disdain became even more pronounced when he spotted the type of inn that his god-brother had chosen to seek shelter. A whorehouse. And a queer, drag-queen type of bordello to boot. Frowning interrogatively, Harry took the time to wonder why of all places his friend would hide in such a place. Then it hit him; the Croaker Brothers were passed a century of life each, and they were raised in an epoch whence homophobia was both church doctrine and Law of the Land. Neither old crone would want to be caught dead in a place like this, and they probably thought that Neville would not dare shame his House name any worse than he had by harboring in the den of debauchery. Snorting in amusement, Harry walked up to the door and tried to open the panel, only to find it locked.

Shrugging, he pushed the bell button to buzz the doorman, or was it door-queen?, to come open so he could find his sibling and offer help. A rather colorfully dressed transvestite opened the door just enough to glare at Harry, who payed more attention to the two steel chains that kept the door from being rammed in, than the girlish pseudo-pout the man gifted him. He wasn't scary, not with that powder-blue dress, pink wig and make-up. Harry having looked upon Dolores Umbridge from up close at her two trials, he'd seen true horror and madness, so a queer prostitute in drag didn't ring his alarm bell anymore.

"Hello... miss?," Harry tried to be polite with the door-person, "I have a delivery of sandwiches and hot coffee for a growing boy that has taken a room in your upstairs floors. Can I get in to complete my run? Please?" he tried to smile with dimples like a cute little tyke. It must have come out awful if the he-whore's facial reactions were any indication. Better not try that again any time soon, then. He'd ask Hermione when he saw her next.

"Egads, boy!" the Madam exclaimed in a low stage whisper, "I haven't seen a glare like that on the worse gang-bangers that try to extort protection money out of us! Where did a kid like you learn to cow people that way? And can you teach me? It would make clearing out the place at three in the morning a lot easier." The prostitute stated amusedly as (he)she ushered the child into the building's ground floor, a night club that was closed until seven in the evening.

The person showed Harry the stairs going up to the paying rooms, telling him "He's in room 202 on the second floor up, right next to the stairs. Each room has its own en-suite and service bar so you should have what you need. But, we open at seven, just after dinner, so you have to leave so we don't get the bobbies called in for using underage kids in the house. We have enough problems as it is, we just can't risk it. If you need more help, the youth shelter four streets over will set you up and call an ambulance, if he needs treatment by pros. Go! He's waited long enough to be cared for as it is."

Thanking the person honestly, Harry climbed the stairs three at a time, reaching the second floor in seconds, then knocked on the door softly to avoid scaring Neville into shooting through the panel in a fit of startled panic. The thin wooden door was opened a bit, just enough for the occupant to identify him, and for Harry to see the shiner around Neville's right eye. A few noises and movements later had Harry safely inside, sitting at a rickety two-person table with the food being unpacked while Neville was sucking up hot coffee as if it were the fresh air that he needed to breathe to stay alive. Smirking at his friend, Harry passed two of the four turkey & bacon sandwiches he had bought, though keeping his own coffee nearby, especially when he saw the other boy's covetous gaze.

"Thanks, man! I really needed that!" Neville exclaimed as he swallowed his first bite of solid food. "Do you still have your emergency first-aid kit that you and Draco showed us how to make? I need a few potions and salves. I'm running on pain management charms and a toke of weed, but it's all coming off pretty damn hard."

Harry pursed his lips, replying instead "Yes, I have the kit, but that's not what happens next. If you were here to experiment for some rough sex and the kinkier side of life, I'd help you without a wink of bother, except razzing you as hard and often as possible for it. Brothers do that, I'm told." he stated in an affected monotone. Ignoring the middle finger raised at him, Harry instead continued with "However, if it was your relatives that put you in this state, then we'll be using my Lord's ring to portkey to Gringotts to have their healers record everything and begin proceedings against the bastards who hurt you. Plus, they can heal you much better than me."

Deflating like a pierced party balloon, the pudgy blond boy raised watery blue eyes at his sibling, asking softly "Are we really at that point? Do I really have to admit publicly just how rotten and useless I am to have any help at all?" Peering at the half-eaten sandwich in his hands, he wondered "Wasn't my being born a squib bad enough? Now I have to go and admit openly that my family thinks I'm lesser than squib, and worth less than a muggle too because I'm born defective somehow."

Harry countered that defeatist attitude by replying "No, you are not admitting any such thing, nor are you going to be shamed for getting the help that the CPS of both mundane and magical worlds say you deserve to receive, simply because you're alive and British. It's that scurvy Rosier gribitch, your grand-mother, and her two arse-lickers who will be shamed in public."

Looking up to his brother, Neville couldn't hold in the snort of amusement. "You have got to teach me how to make that face! Besides the bullies at school, it just might scare off Aggie enough that she leaves me alone when I want to go work at peace with my plants."

Smirking openly, Harry replied "I'll show you a great deal more than how to make faces at them! They'll wish they'd never met you when I'm done with your training! Firstly, you are not a squib, and secondly, not everybody uses magic the same way. We'll have the goblins do a full test on you, and see what's wrong. But I don't understand; you underwent the Awakening Rite at Hogwarts like all the kids who hadn't been through it, and you weren't the only Pureblood who had denied The Old Ways because of Dumbledore's shyte. Maybe the healers didn't find all that he did to you, or somebody else did something after the mandatory exams?" Waving a sandwich holding hand vaguely, Harry declared assuredly "Anyways, the goblins will handle things, and much smarter and quicker than humans tend to do. Their results, you'll be able to trust."

Nodding in acceptance, Neville crumpled the paper wrapper from his first sandwich and threw it at the trash bin, then opened the second portion with gusto. He needed fuel to help his innate magic heal his injuries, especially since he hadn't taken any true potions yet. He really needed to make an effort at learning healing and medical spells, and since the Sorting Hat guided him towards professional herbology and apothecary work, he really had no excuses to delay anymore.

The two god-brothers ate peacefully, or as much as two twelve year old boys teasing and razzing each other could have peace at the lunch table. Harry ribbed Neville for not having used aggressive plants in his own defense, something that should have been a natural reflex for him. The druid-wannabee countered by asking how the betrothal contract negotiations with Dame Dagworth-Granger's parents were going these days. Between smirks, throwing bits of lettuce or bread, and calling out more than a few 'kind' epithets at each other, the boys were soon done with their improvised meal and ready to leave. A few quick spells by Harry had the room spotless and traceless, to avoid somebody picking up biological effluves of them for nefarious purposes.

x----------x

Harry and Neville appeared inside Gringotts' wizarding bank in the predetermined portkey landing terminal, showing their varied rings to the guards on duty. Seizing his sibling's arm tightly, Harry immediately asked the sentry to reserve an emergency meeting with a child healer to inspect his brother as he suspected that the people at St-Mungo's had not been thorough when they did the mandatory check, after Dumbledore's bastardies had been discovered.

Bearing a fierce expression that would have cowed a lesser human, the guard slapped a rune hidden on his armor, calling a priority healer to the arrival room for an injured patient. Any other human child might have exaggerated things, but Lord Peverell's view of things was known to be far too close to that of adult goblin soldiers to set him aside as not urgent. If anything, his account managers had noted a damning tendency to underplay injuries or pain, lest an enemy exploit the weakness.

An admirable quality in a warrior, but utter perversion in a safe, healthy child.

The sentry was roused from his daydream of seeing Dumbledore hang by his beard from the London Bridge's upper traverses by the hurried arrival of the huffing healer, a young female that had begun her apprenticeship two years ago. The medical goblin wasted no time in platitudes, aiming her sharp gaze and claws at poor Neville who had limited exposure to the warrior culture and honor-driven manners of magical humanity's closest allies. Well, when they weren't fighting over the last cookie like too-well matched siblings, that was.

It only took two passes of her hands and placing a healing crystal over Neville's brow to get the female grunting impressive swears that had the guard giving a toothy smirk of approval at her feisty disposition. Harry particularly enjoyed her desire to slowly boil the guts of the man whose fists had left imprints in the boy's face until they were reduced to just broth, so she could forcibly feed them back to him via a funnel up his asshole. Neville didn't understand why his sibling was laughing like he'd been smoking his nargileh again, but the goblins were definitely in on it.

Ignoring the questioning look on the child's injured face, the female goblin took out a small hand-mirror to call the bank's private infirmary that catered to clients, to reserve a room and healer for a priority juvenile case, coming in damaged and hot. She had barely brought the pair into the corridor that a quad of sentries bedecked in full armor with halberds and swords wrapped around them to insure their safe delivery to the healing ward. One look at the female's face had the soldiers wonder if she was entertaining thoughts of justice that needed help to carry out. Volunteers wouldn't be rare, if she were.

Before he could realize the gravity of his situation, much less protest, Neville had been stripped of clothing and put in a ritual cistern to effectuate a basal cleansing rite to flush his soul-aura for the senior healer to have a clear reading. Then the problems began in earnest.

Neville had never been taught how to exteriorize his soul-aura. Mostly because he was told that as a squib it wasn't certain that he even had an aura to show, much less use actively.

The second curse to hit the Protego was the discovery that Neville's Awakening Rite at Hogwarts had worked only partially because his bitch grand-mother had cast blocks on him AFTER the healers from St-Mungo's had done the post-Dumbledore check-up. She had bound his core at 35% and completely locked out the Primal Essaence and Mentalism Realms from his touch. The bastard had wanted the boy to be a squib as she had preached all his life, so she'd made him one.

The third curse to hit was when the healers discovered that somebody had placed a prisoner's block against the activation of the Longbottom 'Blood Compact' in Neville's mind and core, in a manner similar to what Harry and hundreds of others had suffered. However, instead of using the basis of what Dumbledore had put in place but had been removed by the healers, the criminal had built a brand new block, using the Unspeakables' casting method and departmental potions.

The goblins also found out why the new wand that Neville had bought at Ollivander's shop didn't work for him any better than his father's old focus. Somebody had engraved magick-binding runes into both forearms with an unpresence glyph in the cluster to make the system invisible to general health scans. It took a very deep scan with a reading of the soul-aura to find the injuries and determine a means of removing the accursed things.

Finally, the blood analysis revealed that Neville had been fed a diluted dose of Squibbing Oil over the last four weeks, in other words since he had returned to Longbottom Manor. Whomever had done this put around 0,0007% solution in his food at each daily meal to insure that he would in fact end-up being a permanent, incurable squib. If this happened, he could not inherit the Title of Head of Family or Lord Longbottom because the Family Charter had exacting demands to nominate a candidate and accept him by Blood-Law and Spirit.

The goblin healer was cursing a bloody storm at every last piece of equipment in view as he wrote his report with pictures of the young Heir's grave injuries, then multiplied the documents to send simultaneously to the account managers, the king, the wizarding DMLE, aurors and CPS. There would be another mess on the steps of the bank today, but the guards were young and hearty; they could weather the ordeal with gusto and aplomb, as honor demanded.

Neville's last thought was about the nice taste of mulberry in the healing draught he'd swallowed, and how could he produce something similar for his personal use. The warm, safe bed and Harry sitting by his side with Rehz on his shoulder eased any worries or doubts he could have still had as he fell into healing slumber from the potion and exhaustion combined.

Summer vacations 1992; The first toll of the knell

(Lord of the Rings – Uruk-Hai march)

August 1992  
Gringotts Bank  
London, The Britannic Realms

King Ragnok sat at his desk in his bank office, the only one that humans were allowed to see under usual circumstances. The presence of Madam Amelia Bones, Head of the DMLE, Rufus Scrimgeour, Head of the Aurors, and Devellina Burnpit, Head of CPS, was not however normal.

"I trust you have all read the reports from senior healer Veinripper? His conclusions were obvious enough that even an auror cadet just out of the academy would understand the dramatic nature of the vicious attacks perpetrated upon the young Heir Presumptive of Longbottom."

Scrimgeour assented, more out of wanting to dodge the unsubtle dig at his men than because he agreed with the sentiment. The boy's victimization was clear to the naked eye, but there were still a few morons who wouldn't know it, or give a damn about 'rich entitled brats from High Houses getting brought back down to Earth' as some wanted to see done.

Amelia Bones was in a warmongering mood today. It was going on seven months since they'd last had a seated Minister of Magic, and nobody that put their name forward could even pass the basic vetting process, let alone survive the reinforced blood-oath of Fealty and Loyalty ordered by the Queen of England. Some dumb fools had even dared to ask aloud WHY the muggle woman's opinion mattered at all, since she would be obliviated and Imperiused back to obedience after a -proper- Minister had been elected by the Welsh Wiccan Wizengamot's sitting -adult- Warlocks.

Needless to say, five more traitors saw their heads adorn the battlements of the Tower of London, right besides the Pureblood fanatics and bureaucratic fools they wanted to emulate. And finally, that fucking bitch-whore Umbridge was dead, by the queen's decree just yesterday. There were still plenty of paper-pushing, mindless drones who wanted absolute Ministry Rule over every aspect of magical life in Britannia, above and beyond Blood-Law, the Old Ways and the High Traditions of the Darkes, even going so far as trying to coerce people outside the Welsh Wiccan sect. Given the new level of activity their monarch displayed in the governance of the magical domain, that usurpation wouldn't last long, nor end well for the retarded fools involved.

The goblin king's secretary, a young male warrior just out of their military training, barged into the office with a savagery and rancor that humans never saw on goblins outside the dueling pit or official tournaments. The glorified door guard ran straight at his king, dropping himself into a deep kowtow at his feet as he quivered in unholy glee from the foul message he brought.

"Majesty! MAJESTY! She did it!" the secretary howled in almost lustful tones, as he prostrated before his monarch. "The fell cunt that escaped her mother's abortion unction did the unthinkable! She refused the Summons to appear before your throne for Audit!"

Jumping out of his small throne like a catapult stone, the goblin king screamed in outrage that held far too much glee to be so truly scandalized. He ran at the decorative hearth, seizing the war-ax hung on the chimney with his right hand while his left fist punched a small crest on the front of the mantelpiece. Within seconds a cavalcade of rabid soldiers busted through the ajar door, leading with their halberds and shields, a pair of war-priests at their backs with some of the darkest curses given by Gruumsh One-Eye already falling from their lips, as the two prelates ached for enemy blood to be shed this day.

"She DARED!" Ragnok howled loudly enough to make the window panes shake in their frames, "The foul procreate of a Vela and a Harpy's lust has DARED to refuse my Royal Summons to appear for an Audit of the House she holds as Regent! Augusta Rosier Longbottom has betrayed her functions, positions, styles, ranks and titles this day! She has challenged the Treaty between the Welsh Wiccan and the Gringotts Dynasty! She has perverted the Blood-Law of her House and Family by magically oathed marriage! BLOOD! In the name of Gruumsh, I command that there be BLOOD shed in the streets today!"

With a gesture that spoke of glee and orgasmic joy, the young secretary grabbed his king's ax by the blade and slid both palms along the edge, cutting his hands to the bones. Raising both bleeding appendages to the air, he clamored in a outburst of fanatical mania "Gruumsh! Let our axes stay sharp! Let our swords stay straight! Let our arrows fly long and punch harder than a minotaur's fist! Gruumsh! Let your Horde sally forth and chase the quarry until she is brought in, tied to a spit and ready to roast over the Pyre of Heretics!"

The two war-priests took out of their armored robes hunting horns crafted from the horns of dragons that had served Gringotts in Antiquity, when the tunnels were being dug. Together, they sounded their horns, sending forth an ancient call that every goblin in Britain heard by the will and magicks of the Throne of Gringotts.

The March of Gruumsh.

The War Horns of the Horde.

Today, as they had so many times in the past, the goblin people went to war against those that had offended their nation, culture and faith. By decree of the king, there would be no mercy.

Amelia Bones grabbed her associates to drag them aside, far from the rabid goblins, making certain they understood just how bad things were. "You heard it from official sources; Augusta Longbottom refused the Summons of Audit and closed the manor to outsiders. She has essentially declared a one-woman war against the goblins and the Treaty that unites us to their people so as to not have exactly this bitchcrap happen every other month. From now on, NOTHING can be done to help, support, succor or defend Augusta or her associates. Furthermore, it means that Neville is now a Ward of Gringotts until the Audit and investigations by WCPS are finished. He stays here, where he's safe and healing. We have easy access anyways, so it won't hinder us. Just be advised that Gringotts has prerogative in all things concerning his House and Family until the trials are done."

Bones had nothing else to say as her group was summarily shown the door, just as the tellers in the main floor were informing the clientele of the situation caused by Augusta's foolish stance.

It would cause a panic amongst investors, and yet another riot in Diagon District before night fall. The goblins, of course, didn't care as they had a hunt to carry out, and prey to capture.

Summer vacations 1992; A war fought under gaslights

(Rule Britannia)

August 1992  
Multiple locations  
The Britannic Realms, colonies and Commonwealth

The Daily Prophet ran its edition to the presses so fast that evening that the owls were aloft in the rays of false-dawn, a good three hours before they normally delivered. The citizens of magical Britain had been cowering in panic behind their wards (for the rich) and doors (for the poor) all night in the hopes that the cruel goblins and their wicked blades would not breach their homes.

Then the newspapers had come, and furor exploded all over the country again.

x----------x

Despite all the efforts deployed by the Croaker Brothers and the felonious Unspeakables under their power, the goblins had outsmarted them again. They had bypassed the Prophet completely, sending their privileged information to the Wizarding Wireless and to the same international medias that had helped them a decade ago to break the Sirius Black false imprisonment case.

The two old crones had worked all night, riding hard on their men to print as many drugged copies of their fake Prophet edition as the antiquated piston press could produce. The up-down mechanism was fully automated, as were the paper spoolers and cutters, leaving only the stacking and folding to be done by wand. However, piston presses need to change their engraved plates for each quatuor of pages they print, a manual process that takes roughly a half hour to do if everything goes right.

Despite being an antique with a low speed and very limited capacities in terms of graphics and lettering, the Unspeakables' prototype scriptworkes imprinter was delivering a whopping three hundred copies per hour of each quad-form. They managed to put out 2,000 copies of an edition that had 24 stapled pages inside of six hours.

While the Croaker Brothers were patting themselves on the back that their mind-spiked minions had managed to print a full run of 2,000 copies without drooling all over it, then wasted time arguing about where they should target their poisonous devices, the three immediate competitors had already moved. The vicious lies they tried to spread wouldn't go far, and get debunked right fast, as would their method of mind-control.

x----------x

The independent magazine The Quibbler, run as an artisanal project by Xenophilius Lovegood, used an old press from the late 1800's that would have been common in most cities of Europa and North America. It used two printing plates wrapped around two drums with a self-inking system. You had to switch the thin sheet-steel plates for each quatuor of page you printed, which took about five minutes to do. The mechanical drums could spit out nearly 920 copies of each form per hour, which then had to be stacked, cut and folded by wand. A separate machine stapled the address bands around each envoy and the well trained owls took a pair of papers each without prompting.

Xenophilius usually did a print run of 15,000 copies, sending more than 12,000 outside the Welsh Wiccan community due to how bigoted and close-minded his birth sect was. He wouldn't have been able to live and thrive from his pet project if it weren't reaching enough readers to keep the advertisers coming year after year.

The Quibbler moved across the British Realms, colonies and Commonwealth at the speed of Xenophilius and his daughter Luna's capacity to travel through the Floo to fill deposit points, supply the news kiosks that sold the papers for a cut, and the Owl Post offices in Diagon and Hogsmead to send out the home subscriptions. They even had an international following, with eight small bundles of fifty copies going out by cross-border portkey to Europa, Slavia, America and an exclusive press-relay company in central Asia, in Hong-Kong.

x----------x

The Daily Prophet's modern steam-powered multi-drum press could spool paper at 6,000 copies per hour on a bad day, or go up to its cruising speed of 13,000 copies in two hours flat. It had four sets of double-drums that could process four different quad-forms in parallel, thusly making 16 pages simultaneously, at the machine's full speed while also cutting, stacking and folding the run, all without any human of elf input. When the paper was thicker than 16 pages, they did a second or third run of pages, using as many of the drum-lines as necessary. Technically, the Prophet's normal daily output was 26,000 copies of 20 – 32 pages, all printed inside 8 hours. Once the papers were folded, a separate machine stapled a charmed address band with the subscriber's Owl Post or Floo coordinates so that the delivery department only had to send out the parcels without doing any of the slow jobs needed to prepare each envoy.

The Daily Prophet had its own proprietary parliament of owls, and all the owlry jobs (delivery & reception) were done by well cared-for house-elves who were some of the best educated and informed, after those in the Ministry or Hogwarts. They were incredibly quick at sending out their parcels; "Best service in Britain every day, indeed" was their creed.

Contrary to popular belief, the Daily Prophet didn't survive out of the Ministry's desire to have a pliable mouthpiece. They were independently viable and profitable as they delivered across all of magical Britain's sectors and species. However, the Welsh Wiccan Ministry had used a variety of laws, audits, and forcibly putting cronies inside the business to usurp control, to the point that it looked from the outside as just a Ministerial puppet. It wasn't, and the Croaker Brothers were going to get a harsh reminder of this truth that morning when Barnabas Cuffe' editorial was read.

x----------x

The American publication favored by Gringotts was The Washington DC Magical Herald, the biggest and most reliable newspaper on the New World, even if it was only 125 years old. They had benefited from the massive war efforts that happened during and after WW-II to build a brand-new, dedicated printing edifice that was separate from their editorial and typesetting offices. The massive facility run on hydro-electric power produced by their own private dam on a small tributary of the Potomac River, a few hundred yards away.

They had four massive vertical printing lines, each equipped with four paired-drum sets, that could process upwards of 9,000 quad-forms per hour in parallel. The system could push out 64 pages (16 x 4) that were cut, stacked and folded as fast as they were printed. A normal daily run for them was 90,000 copies spread over a twelve hour work shift.

The more recent innovations in embossing scriptworkes mechanically with enchanting oil mixed into the ink allowed the presses to have a highly technical device embedded into each printing drum to create a variable element in the headers, footers and folios of each individual page as it passed the line.

The Herald didn't use traditional engraved plates to print. Instead, they used self-shaping copper drums that had an Arinyark battery and crystalline heuristics core inside, all hard-linked by crystal tubes to the central control core and consoles. It was basically a technomantic merging of mechanical presses with magical management, distribution and application of information. Each of the four printing segments of each double-drum received its specific image to print, and a small program on the side allowed to add the logo of a restaurant or hospital to indicate a proprietary copy bought by an establishment, without needing to do plate changes. Likewise, all the delivery addressing was done automatically by the press, embossing the subscription ID directly into each page of the edition as it wound through the printing lines. At the end, the automated cutters and stackers detected the ID's and gathered the appropriate sheets together for folding and stapling.

The DC Magical Herald didn't use owls to deliver. They hadn't since WW-II saw most of their living postal owls get drafted by the US Army to be used at the frontlines to deliver potions and supplies in shrunken boxes to the aurors, hit-wizards and private volunteers that had gone to fight Grindelwald's madness. This caused the Herald to invest massively in an antique tech that had done its proofs over the centuries; secured mail boxes. In partnership with several magical banks, the entire US and Canadian magical postal services were converted from using owls over to giving each civic address a 'generic reception' box that could receive from up to 12 pre-allowed locations, like the local postal service, a few stores that shipped small stuff, and of course, the local newspapers.

The DC Herald had its own ZIP code and a highly secured, tightly monitored expedition hall containing several hundred automated 'outgoing' boxes hard-linked to their crystal control core to be fully powered & warded at all times. Each box had an internal sensor that detected the charmed address & ID code imprinted on each edition, immediately sending it to the correct reception box at the other end of the network, for a fee equal to 1% of what a Floo delivery would have cost in England or elsewhere.

On top of delivering nearly 90,000 copies around the USA, every morning, the DC Magical Herald always held a smaller print run to supply the 18,000 copies required by its international subscribers, many of which were governments, banks, schooling institutions and rich private investors with an eye for world events. These copies were embossed with the logo & ID of the institution they were sent at, or the branding of the news company that sold them in their kiosks along dozens of other imported periodicals. The Washington DC Magical Herald was the biggest English speaking news carrier for the British Commonwealth since WW-II ended. They had never kowtowed to the Welsh Wiccan sect, and wouldn't start today as their articles would show.

x----------x

When the two Croaker Brothers heard about the little mongrel Neville having gone to Gringotts for help against Augusta's firm and strict disciplinings of his lazy, worthless squib self, they knew that the time for their gig had just come up. They were caught short, the project hadn't been planned to work this way. They were supposed to get a draft copy of the Prophet so they could forcibly insert their texts into the layout, then send it back to the paper for printing before Cuffe and the upper staffers saw anything amiss. This should ensure that nobody saw any difference between their own drugged copies and those of the actual DP.

Instead, they got caught out of the blue, and now had to rush the printing of a generic version titled "Extra Edition – National Security at Risk! – Parselmouth Involved!" and hope that it passed muster long enough for the charms and oils to have effect on the gullible saps that would read them in the morning.

As it was, this attempt to create a popular panic movement against Harry Potter and any allies he had garnered at Hogwarts would be what decided the muggle queen to get involved full-time in the affairs of the magical side of her Realms.

x----------x

The alarmist title of the small, exclusive run of the Daily Prophet gave conniptions to any who saw it, causing a massive cognitive dissonance in their brains when the real Prophet arrived on schedule, and in the prescribed manner. The psychological imbalance was worsened when a few of those who bought The Quibbler showed their neighbors or work colleagues their magazine, to compare with the usual gutter-trash printed by the Prophet that morning.

Now, most British citizens aren't actually born dumb or defective, even in the magical side of things, so the plebes quickly gathered that something was going wrong in Britain.

The first visible symptom was that the Prophet NEVER put out two different editions at the same time since it costs twice the production and delivery fees for no reason whatsoever. They preferred to make a single edition with bigger, bolder titles to grab attention. If necessary, they had in the past delayed delivery to print a much thicker edition than usual, or because they were waiting on critical information to finish articles that would affect the population the moment the papers were in their hands. But they never put out two editions the same day. NEVER.

The second symptom was that people who read that weird 'National Security' version suddenly got angry to the point of climbing up onto stairs, chairs, tables or even the bar of the tavern, to start haranguing the people about the dark evils of Parseltongue and Parselmouths, and how their families were in imminent danger from such unnaturalities. The crux of the problem; Harry Potter, the usurper child who had stolen the titles to House Potter, Black and Peverell as if he, a mere slip of a boy, had any right to do so. A specially grievous offense when wise, old, powerful and mighty adults of great age and experience were available to hold these seats, votes and monies, until the wretched mudblood spawn had shown proper deference towards their Pureblood wizarding ways.

That particular rant got stuck sideways in most people's brains; Harry Potter inherited his houses fair and square, the goblins and ICW had said so, and every colony or member of the Commonwealth had confirmed it in the weeks that had followed the ascensions. You had to be pretty daft, stupendously ignorant, or flat-out bonkers to think this load of tosh was true. And yet, some of the most mild-mannered citizens in the country were turning themselves into firebrands, trying to preach that Harry Potter was an apostle of Darkness and evil to boot, just because he spoke to reptiles and had a Faerie Drake for a familiar.

And that was the third symptom that woke up the population that something was going on behind the obvious. All of the information that the special edition declared was 'Urgent National Matters of Grave Importance to the Realms' was in fact obsolete. Everybody knew Harry Potter's life story since it had been revealed in goblin court during their interrogation of Albus Dumbledore, and confirmed several times when other nations, churches, guilds and chartered Families had their solicitors go at him with other questions that cut across what he did in Britain over the last century. The plebes were starting to see that their friends and neighbors were suddenly all a-twitter with worries and bile about stuff that they'd known about for months already, and hadn't panicked back then when it came out the first time. So why now?

All it took was a few apothecaries, medi-witches and doubtful parents with a first-aid kit on hand to administer a quick test to the affected persons to detect they had been charmed & poisoned into acting like utter fools in public. A few detections charms later had the offending newspaper copies seized and contained for the aurors to examine, when they got there.

Apparently, these toxic papers had been dispersed widely throughout Diagon District, Knockturn District and even Hedgerow Terrace district, to concentrate the effects on as large a population basin as they could affect. They were also those who were closest to Gringotts, if the organizers wanted to create a riot big enough to force an emergency closure of the bank to worsen the popular panic.

Well, the unseen organizers were quickly shown that even the hundred years of forcible dumbing down of society imposed in tandem by Dumbledore and the Welsh Ministry weren't enough to truly stop the British Spirit of Freedom. Hundreds of angry people made a riot, alright, but in the atrium of the Welsh Wiccan Ministry of Magic, demanding to know who had done this seditious deed, and what was getting done about it. Except that the menial bureaucrats didn't know anything about the situation, and most of the departments had no Heads or Directors anymore, due to the successive purges by the queen, and the multiple 'protest' resignations that had happened since.

Calls to the Department of Mysteries to get some assistance were met with silence, which would be explained only much later, when the DMLE would manage to penetrate the heavily warded halls to figure out why nothing answered their messages anymore.

Summer vacations 1992; The second toll of the knell

(Rule Britannia)

August 1992  
Multiple locations  
The Britannic Realms, colonies and Commonwealth

Saul Croaker was buttering his toasted English muffin quite studiously in an effort to ignore his fuming older sibling and paramour who sat across from him. Their own breakfasts were sitting cold in their plates, despite their small elf having done a superb job at trying to uplift their dark spirits this morning. Honestly, Saul thought, that pair should have foreseen this happening.

Their arithmantic models had recommended between 20 and 25,000 copies distributed around England's central regions for the fake papers to have any chance at reaching the critical mass of drugged readers needed for the rest of the crowd to not be able to counteract the effects. Instead, they had allowed a very minor inconvenient, because Neville getting free of Augusta was only that, to decimate the production schedule and thusly scupper the plan. Algernon had had one of his vicious, violent reactions as he got whenever a Longbottom male was mentioned, and therefore the older sibling had bull-rushed everything to the system' s breaking point.

The two brothers had to use the prototype press inside the Department of Mysteries that was normally used to print the clean archival copies of their internal memos, forms, work product and archives that should not be seen by the rest of the Ministry's peons. The device was old, obsolete, and not capable of supplying the speed and options their finicky plan had demanded to be executed without hitches. In his mad rush to punish the Longbottom boy for having yet again disappointed and hurt his grand-mother, Algernon had screwed everything to Hell and back.

Saul's misgivings of just how complex and convoluted their plan had been came back to him, as he spread some berry jam on his muffin, chewing a bite slowly to let his powerful mind work at its natural rhythm. The idea of crowd manipulation was not new, and not stupid. It had worked in the past and sometimes for prolonged durations, as Dumbledore had so aptly demonstrated. For a man who worked mostly alone, the old buzzard had been frightfully efficient and prolific. The plan that Saul and Algernon had elaborated should have had similar success rates, for short-term application, leading up to using secondary and tertiary methods to entrap the peasants into a fake world of their devising.

And that was where the error had occurred.

In their planning, they had known that the newspaper would just be the bait that brought people to the Department of Mysteries out of panic and despair. After putting out at least two weeks of charmed editions, it would have been time to place adverts in all periodicals sold in the UK to have a massive recruitment drive for external contractors, interns, administrative associates and apprenticeships for occultists and esoterists of proven capacity. Amongst these paid minions, the very best would get a chance to join their putsch willingly, or else get nerve-spiked. The mid-level managers and apprentices would get the usual confondus – imperius – confondus routine with a curse sustention elixir to hold the control in place for months at a time.

The initial plan would have taken at least a year to put in place properly, before they could challenge the Queen and her Royal Archmage with the magical troops that had been training for the safety of the Throne. Instead, Algernon had experienced a tremor in his left testicle that had made the entire house of cards collapse on top of them, just like when he got condemned by the Wizengamot to lose the House & title, getting exiled for a decade out of the English Realms.

His brother was a loose cannon driven by his crotch and a manic hatred of Longbottom males that nothing could explain anymore. Saul had done multiple tests on both of them, and couldn't find anything left-over from Dumbledore or anybody else. That left just one option; the centenarian fool was lovesick with his Augusta gribitch to the point that logic and safety no longer mattered, not until he had mounted her like a mongrel in the farmyard did with aforementioned she-dog, as was their nature.

The rare moment of self-awareness was caused because Algernon was too preoccupied at calming down Augusta from yet another bout of explosive distemper to keep the Blood-Law tight around his brain. Saul knew it wouldn't last, so he desperately muttered a single word in the Common of Lower Planes, causing a magical effect to catastrophically injure his older brother when the invisible suicide runes tattooed on his spine and nape detonated with twin blasts of negative energy, killing him and destroying more than 60% of the cadaver.

Now freed of Algernon after years of being his puppet without realizing the source or method, Saul aimed his eyes at Augusta and legilimized her violently, tearing through her Inner-World without care for the damages he did. Fuck! The damned bitch had been manipulating the two brothers for decades by massaging Algernon's easily bruised manliness whenever she wanted something dirty or criminal done in secret. His fool brother had been dangling from her hand by the cock like a felon hanging from the gallows' beam at the end of a rope! The imbecile had been hers since Hogwarts, some eight decades ago, and he never wondered how or why, when it was well known that a formal betrothal contract linked the Houses of Rosier and Longbottom, due to come into effect that generation or both Families would have to pay each other heavy damages.

Slamming the manipulative shrew's mind and memories hard like the door to a room that he were leaving in a snit, Saul got out of her mind full of contempt for himself at being so submissive to his brother without reason, and against Algernon for never growing up in the passed eighty years. He had always been like a rutting hog, inured of his sow and nothing else.

Raising a spare, unregistered wand at the elderly woman's face, Saul Croaker incanted slowly "Id visu publicum, honnis est!" (Let your shame be seen in public). The old roman curse hit Augusta in the face and neck, flaying, raising and crimping the epidermal layers of the left side of her head in an artfully horrifying, monstrous display of ugliness. She had been inflicted the ancient "Familial Shame Brand" that would mark her as an oath-breaker and traitor to House Croaker for the rest of all times. Even in death, her soul would bear the brand, visible to any who summoned her, and any magical portraits that were made of her would modify to reflect the Judgment passed upon her by a Most Ancient and Most Noble House, despite that the Gamot had ripped their title, rank, style and position from them five decades back.

Let this be a warning to the bureaucrats!

It wasn't because you signed papers in an office that Mystra would approve and make it so! The curs in London may have voted on debasing the Family and House of Croaker, but they still had Blood-Law and magicks in their bodies! And vengeance would be theirs! Well, his now, since Algernon wasn't in position to wreck finely tuned plans anymore. And, boy did that feel good, not having that bastard in charge anymore! It was like finally getting rid of a whisperer worm that had been in his brain for decades, and now finally being alone inside his own mind.

A few idle twists of his traceless wand had Augusta's four long limbs crushed and crippled until she got some pretty heavy magical healing, then he set her into a bio-stasis field, anchoring the charm to a quick glyph burned into the floor next to her broken form.

"Lully!" Called the old man, after his elf. "Pack-up the entire safe-house, including all of Algernon's things and search his corpse, too. I will be searching through the Rosier's things myself to see what depravities she had planned for us, when we were asleep. I shan't be long, a quarter hour should suffice. I want to be gone before morning tea ends, so we're long gone and far away when the goblins arrive to recover their quarry."

A silent, subtle pulse of magic was his answer, just as he had trained the elf to do. His brother had been an openly avowed specist who despised the elves, specifically because of how open-ended their true potential was compared to the limited bodies and minds of humans. The miserable bastard had killed five of the elves that Saul had bought over the decades, when he got into fits of rage that he couldn't assuage without lethally harming something.

A half-hour later, the Master Teller of the Day at Gringotts received a Patronus message about where to find the treasonous woman, Augusta Rosier Longbottom, and not to bother with a reward as her face was its own payment. Saul Croaker had even told them it was him who did the deed, and left a letter signed with his new Lord's ring as proof. No use hiding, since Gringotts had gotten a blood sample of each client the very moment they opened an account or vault, so it would be an utter waste of time. If they wanted him, they could find him unless he left Earth altogether.

And, right now, exiling himself into the Styx River demi-plane looked mighty appealing. In fact, it was the favored solution, he thought. He had no home left, his valuables were split between four shrunken trunks that were linked together via a private teleportation plate system he had copied from the goblin's own devices, so he wouldn't be abandoning anything important. There were a few crystal antennae, hidden under a Blood-locked sorcerous Fidelius, spread around magical Britain, Europa and Slavia, linked by free-waves to a similarly hidden apartment trunk holding the controllers and recording devices. Saul would leave the safe-house trunk behind and open a gate every month or so, to get some news about how Britain fared, but probably wouldn't come back again. The only purpose of the antennae was to make certain nobody came hunting for him without knowing about the brewing troubles.

Summer vacations 1992; The Welsh Ministry Falls

(Rule Britannia)

August 1992  
Multiple locations  
The Britannic Realms, colonies and Commonwealth

Elizabeth II of House Windsor was, to put it mildly, in a tizzy. It had been more than seven full months since her wizards had to intervene inside the British Wizengamot chamber, and they still didn't have a single hope of finding an honest, loyal candidate for Minister in sight! Every person to postulate had been dishonest, felonious, bigoted or planned to fake the signing of the fealty oaths to then have every member of the Royal House obliviated or killed inside of one month so that muggles never interfered in Welsh Wiccan or magical affairs again. In fact, three of the men who had applied didn't even realize they had to swear oaths to the English Crown in the person of Elizabeth II, and backed out of their own volition when they learned of it. Needless to say they were promptly arrested for bigotry and planning to betray the queen and monarchy, leading to short trials and slow executions.

The entire situation was a bloody mess, quite literally, with how many people had ended their days inside The Tower of London, more than in the last three centuries combined.

Making a face of disgust at the entire sordid affair, Her Majesty swooped into the small throne room that was built into the deeper foundation beneath Buckingham Palace to accommodate the magical species that didn't want to be seen or affected by the Prime Material Plane and its myriad denizens. Marching from the main entrance, she surprised the attendees by walking the long way to her dais instead of appearing on the teleporter platform next to the throne. Her smile was tight and fixed as she saluted curtly the guests, including King Ragnok of the British Goblins, Thann Emerick Darbaney of the Scott Dwarves, Legate Mikey O'Shanter of the Irish Halfling Cooperative, and Coronal Ulvar Nullithiel of the Noble Elves of Britannia.

On the periphery of the hall stood the leaders of mercenary bands with whom Elizabeth II or her ancestors had done business, when the monarchy could not be officially involved in acts of violence or destruction inside the sovereign borders of other nations. Hallgarax the Minotaur, Luutsh the Ogre, and the ever mysterious D'Ahaxae Inifiel of the Unseelie Sidhe (noble dark Fae court).

x----------x

Dame Windsor climbed regally the five steps of the dais to sit upon her throne, draped in crimson robes covered in segmented gray steel armor plates in a style that was usually reserved for exhibition in the London Museum. The vestments were acromantula silk covering a thin layer of hydra leather and alchemically crafted steel reinforcements. The war-robes of the Queen hadn't been seen worn by an English monarch in nearly four hundred years, as even during the occasional 'Goblin Rebellions', the fight was between species and sects, never against the Crown itself, so the queen and her predecessors had never felt the need.

Until today.

The symbol was poignant, and declared loudly what words could not.

The magical side of the British Empire, its colonies and Commonwealth had collapsed into anarchy and civil unrest beyond their internal capacity to regulate or recover from, once the necessary cleansing cycle had been processed. The seven month long hiatus in government in the Welsh Wiccan sect would not have been fatal of itself, as the sect was minuscule on the gameboard, but the effect had dominoed into other groups.

The White Council had suddenly developed an idea that THEY were the natural replacements as Ministerial cabinet to represent Britannia to her magical subjects and allies. They had also taken Dumbledore's crimes as a blank check to try bullying people into turning over their tools, devices and books without any rights to do this. All according to an antiquated belief system based on a God that no longer granted miracles because he died 900 years ago. There had already been several cases of these 'Wardens' committing assault, injuries, mind-rape and unlawful interrogation under truth potions of British and foreign nationals while flashing badges that meant nothing. They were an occult sect, not a law-enforcement organization, but like the Catholic Church and its Inquisition, they believed that saying 'God told me to' often enough would eventually silence those that they couldn't kill, handicap, knock-out or bribe into collaborating with their take-over of Britannic soil and populations.

When Elizabeth II had tried to contact the White Council in Edinburgh, they had replied that she was a mere muggle, unawares and unable to grasp the full gravity and Holy Portents that the fall of the heathen Wiccan sect represented for True Believers of Jesus and his Angels. They eschewed her will and authority, reneging in writing any and all Treaties, Pacts, Contracts and Codiciles that had ever bound them to Britain, declaring that the "Time to fight Darkness" was upon the faithful, and no magicless or faithless chair-warmer was going to forbid or stop it.

Thusly, the Empire was now at civil war on two fronts; the irrevocable collapse of the Welsh Wiccan to their internal depravities and mental weaknesses, and the White Council's spurious attempts to trigger a religious war between the many racial and spiritual factions so as to topple the English Crown and all other monarchs in one fell swoop.

x----------x

The short but clear exposé had the national leaders assembled growling and glaring malevolently at their tables and writing tools, trying to avoid directing such powerful malice at the already enraged human queen. After the slew of cruel executions perpetrated in The Tower since last Samhain 1991, nobody here was stupid enough to think she didn't have the guts (ironic, that) to bloody her hands to keep her throne and crown about her person and clanhold.

A quick, brutal and final solution to the problems caused by the unforgivable Welsh Wiccan's humanocentric bigotries and denial of Gaia's primacy was created then given to the mercenaries to process. The minotaurs and ogres would handle that part of the problem easily enough, with the Fae supplying the high-magics experts for when the R&D portions of the buildings were broken open to search and capture resistance fighters. The queen wanted to know what foul abominations the Welsh Department of Mysteries had been working on, especially since Saul and Algernon Croaker had become involved. She also wanted to know if Dumbledore had any drug puppets inside, and what he had them work on, before it bit them all.

King Ragnok asked the poisonous question that the mercenary bosses had avoided; "What of Hogwarts and Hogsmead? They fall under a Royal Warrant that is part of the Magna Carta since ten centuries ago. What happens there? And will the school open this year?"

Elizabeth II was implacable in her answering decree. "The children who go to Hogwarts will have to swear an oath of fealty to the British Empire's Crown and Throne, as their forebears used to do, until the late 1500's when the practice was stopped by the wizards, without ever asking the crown if they had the right of it. So will their parents, if they live or work on British soil. Foreign students, if there are any, will have a modified oath that does not interfere with those oaths given to their Family, House or nation of origin, and their parents won't be bound unless they also live on our soil. All religious or sectarian oaths will be rewritten to become subordinate to the Britannic Crown, or the sect will be declared seditious and treasonous, thus to be cleansed until only loyal British subjects remain in its fellowship ranks and titled priesthood."

Frowning most mightily, Dame Windsor snarled "As for that abomination called 'Hogsmead', an affront to the Treaty if there ever was one, it will be torn to the ground and the foundations excavated so that the wardstones are removed. Then, once new Treaties with the Centaurs and other nations that inhabit the nearby lands are done, the village will be rebuilt, but, according to the plans and visions that had been the goals of the original agreement to found the place. The structural blueprints will be updated and modern utilities WILL be installed in all edifices and spaces, without any exceptions. They will have running water, sewage drains, gas and oil, electricity and coaxial cable for television or the new Internet that is spreading. A local branch of the British Magical Wireless will be built, along with new postal facilities, public Floo hub, moving the train line into the village limits, and an airfield for our Royal Air Force. Other details will be given to the architecture committee that will supervise the construction effort."

Turning her head towards the dwarf king, Elizabeth II stated "The securing and guarding of Hogwarts will be assigned to your troops, Thann Darbaney, to avoid the client – banker conflicts of interests that could arise if the goblins were to accomplish this part. Likewise, King Ragnok, if your fearless men could participate in cleaning out Hogsmead to lance this festering boil off our nation's face, I would be quite grateful to your nation."

The two allied monarchs nodded acceptance of the chosen tasks without issue, leaving the queen to assign other parts quickly.

"Legate O'Shanter, if the halflings could invest St-Mungo's to secure the patients, healers and apothecary shops in the building, we would be grateful."

The hobbits' elected governor nodded happily as this was a job with less risks of fighting and killing than the other jobs. The stupid wizards were likely to be shooting the darkest curses to defend their homes and businesses, but everybody had accepted St-Mungo's had -Sanctuary- status since it was built. Even the White Council's Wardens didn't go in uninvited, neither did the Grim Hunters or Watcher's Council minions. However, the risks were a mite worse, as one stray curse could hit the potions cabinets or set fire to an apothecary shop and the building would alight as a bonfire on St-Patty's Day. So, less fighting, but bigger danger if a fool walked in.

Dame Britannia addressed the King of Noble Elves last; "Coronal Nullithiel, if your rangers and archers could help to secure the Diagon District, we would be grateful. They do not need to worry about Knockturn District or Hedgerow Terrace. These two zones have already sent me their vows of fealty via the Lycan Pack Fangoria, and the Green Sisterhood. My Royal Archmage has verified the pledges and met with the representatives, deeming them valid. We shall, of course, see what happens when all is done, but for now, these zones are not prioritary."

Nods all around the room answered the royal proclamation, as the indicated monarchs and mercenary leaders took notes on their parts of the job to be finished by sundown on Friday, so that the investigations and reconstruction could be processed much faster than everything else to date had been. Dumbledore was guiltier than a Titled Lord of Hell, yet he still languished in the goals beneath Gringotts because a plethora of idiots were dragging their feet on minutiae. That situation too, would be corrected before September arrived.

{ HP } --- { Make it all burn! } --- { HP }

It was a bleak, dreary night, between the second Saturday and second Sunday of August 1992, when a series of cataclysmic events shook the Welsh Wiccan sect and the rest of Magical Britannia to the core of their existence.

The British Ministry of Magic, the seat of power for the Welsh Wiccan for nigh on a millenia and the only magical governmental body that had formal titular standing in Britain, was assaulted most violently and basely by sub-humans and under-beings of fell natures. The wards that protected the venerable institution for ten centuries flared once before shutting down altogether, being dis-activated from inside without ever striking out at the attackers a single time. The internal protections of the Ministry suffered a similar, shameful end as their control nodes were overridden or disconnected from the Power sources. And finally, the power sink beneath the underground building was opened, for the first time in public knowledge in four centuries, the enemy troops seizing control of the Mana Source and shutting off the spigots that allowed the hyper-dense Primal Essaence to flow through the crystal pillar.

In less than thirty minutes, the three 'soft' outer layers were penetrated, invested and suppressed with such efficiency that the two hundred minotaur mercs were starting to grumble about this being a burglary job more than the high-risk, hard fight bunker-busting they had been promised.

The horned humanoids soon got their wish granted when a series of hidden alcoves released their localized wards to disgorge hundreds of three-foot tall metal golems that started to attack, maim and kill everything in sight with gleeful abandon. It appeared that the first 'hardened' zone had been reached, and the DMLE's perimeter was proving to be entertaining for the bellicose tastes of the Labyrinth Masters. Great lustful bellows of glorious exultation commingled with shrieks of agonizing misery as the two groups fought, each minotaur easily capable of taking on a dozen golems at the same time with a combination of polearm, shield and spells. In the din of the fight, the minotaur war-priests could be heard chanting diverse prayers to bolster the bodies and minds of their brethren while a few overlords and arch-lords invoked the glory of Minos Amcathra, their god, to smite the soulless constructs with divine might. Giant hands made of raw energy squeezed a half-dozen machines at a time, whilst small noxious clouds swirled on the spot, rusting to fine dust any metallic item that passed through. One amused overlord cast a 'Cement' spell at the bots, catching a dozen of them in a shapeless glob of wet concrete that slowed their movements and weapons enough for the nearby warriors to rip them apart.

After a short hour of amusing exercise, the minotaurs advanced on the second 'hard' line of the Ministry, the Auror Corps' central commandment offices, with the interrogation rooms, workshops, tool storage and Ministry cell blocks. This internal perimeter was heavily guarded by a set of localized wards powered by two decentralized wardstones, a system less than 30 years old, by the look & feel of the matrix. The warding style was also much more appropriate to the cruelties and betrayals that had been commonplace during the Welsh Blood Purity War of '75 than regular peacekeeping duties. The minotaur war-priests enjoyed the task of fighting the stubborn thing into submission, the conflict of Faith versus Sorcery being always a pleasant one for the horned devotees of the Patron of Gladiators, Mercenaries and Sentinels.

With their wardline gone, the few aurors inside the department refused to surrender. Even when they were given the magically notarized and binding command of their queen, the human aurors just refused to accept that a mere muggle could order them, let alone that bull-headed hybrids could cause that much violence and damages that they should be afraid of them. That proved to be a mistake, as the Royal Warrant was extremely clear; "Any who refuse to kneel to Britannia are traitors, and traitors know only one end in this Realm". The minotaurs gleefully attacked and reduced the human fools inside of a short half hour of brutal, satisfying combat that implicated as much casting of curses and elemental attacks as it did sheer raw brutality. Several mercenaries simply charged their opponents to grapple them bodily, throwing them at the furniture hard enough to break both the wooden items and the men's backs or necks.

With the aurors decimated and their armory neutralized at the cost of roughly 30 of the minotaur soldiers dying or being handicapped, the plan was progressing apace. All that was left was the third 'hard' perimeter, the Department of Mysteries. Now, things were gonna get fugly.

Human Unspeakables had little care for morality, let alone good taste. This was a well known fact all around the magical communities of the entire Earth. Even the other humans who didn't work internally or as contractors to the Department freely acknowledged that this bunch of quacks had serious problems in the sanity and equilibrium categories. When the joint force of minotaurs and ogres began to attack the officially known door to the sector, they were able to see first hand just how true that was.

The first reaction the department's siege-wards had was to send out a mental attack designed to render everybody in its zone 'Friend-Slayer' in that each and every violent act a person did would accidentally hit their closest friend, ally or job-mate instead of damaging the building. This was of course backed by small vents spraying out gaseous 'Unction of Rabidness' while invisible runes emitted an aura of vengefulness and small decorative reliefs that seemed innocuous sent out mental waves that destabilized the senses of right & wrong as well as Friend-or-Foe. The Unspeakables had always known that wounds inflicted by betrayal of trust would hurt more and fester worse than anything else, long after the fighting was done, even if it were proven that drugs and spells were the cause of the betrayals in the first place.

Trust broken is NEVER the same, no matter what you say or do.

That was why after five minutes of trying to shut down the damnable gauntlet, the attackers were subjected to an aura of 'Paranoid Delusion' combined with a gaseous 'Potion of Anxiety' that sent their violent urges skyrocketing. Finally, the ogres managed to physically demolish the doorway where the pivoting room stood guard, ripping apart the carousel system to have free passage to all the corridors.

Except that there weren't any corridors.

The fabled spinning carousel doorway was a ruse; when the cabin pivoted, it did so in random fashion until it stopped in front of what looked like a doorway with a corridor but was in truth a 'Wizard Door', a type of short-range magical portal. The split between the rotating cabin and the edges of the portals were so well harmonized that only wardmasters or magical sensitives could ever perceive the deception. So, there were six magically enchanted doorways towards the deeper bowels of the Department of Mysteries, and each was controlled from the deeper side, with wards and defenses different from each other to keep attackers guessing.

Now this was the fun the minotaurs and ogres had been promised!

Two ogres and a minotaur were badly injured when a 'Blade Barrier' materialized inside the space where the pivoting cabin used to be. The energy swords mostly bounced off the enchanted armors and spells the soldiers had, but a few unlucky swipes penetrated through joints or worn-out sections of the mage-armors. A quick dispel from an overlord had the coast clear, and the ogres whacking away at the walls with their huge mattocks and shovels to dig through any further idiocies the humans might have put in place.

Snort! Humans! Such two-dimensional beings, these soft-skinned fools.

They always thought that orcs, ogres and trolls were dumb and barbaric, but they had no idea of the culture they lived. Especially in war. Being mostly located in mountains and caverns, these races knew well the advantages of concealed tunnels and trap doors, as well as the tactical soundness of sapping the enemy's positions to either break their defenses, or surround a besieging force. Here, the human Unspeakables had build themselves a neatly boxed-in concrete cellar, hoping that their enemies would be forced to fight through the small doors and passages, marching slowly through gauntlet after gauntlet, their offense getting ground-down to nothing by attrition of traps, without a single living entity involved. It might have worked, too, if the attackers were as physically weak as humans and their ilk.

Ogres and minotaurs, however, were quite at ease in tunnels and just loved to bash walls or drop ceilings to make larger caverns. Any being who thought he was safer in fighting the towering giants in the confines of a building or underground cavern had no clue the troubles he was inviting to fall on his head. The Department of Mysteries would become a textbook case-study in why it doesn't pay to try to bring these races under the surface of the Earth in a fight. The speed at which the 10 foot tall minotaurs and 12 foot tall ogres were bashing, crushing and digging their way through the walls reinforced by scriptworkes and alchemy explained why even the mightiest of the dwarven nations tried to avoid getting their goblin, orc, ogre and troll neighbors enraged without a valid reason. In less than an hour, the vanguard of the mercenaries had punched through some of the toughest defenses known to magical humans in Britannia since the Fall of Camelot, nearly 900 centuries back. In two hours, the minotaur war-priests and ogre shamans had established their own permanent portals to link the original lobby with the six arrival points of the old wizard doors in the different sequestered sectors of the department.

Then the fun began.

Hunting the Unspeakables inside their last bastion was gonna be a great sport for all the mercs involved, especially with Queen Elizabeth II's bounty on each man they brought back alive or dead, as long as the Lorne sphere was in hand too.

x----------x

The Hall of Prophecies was deemed useless as more than two thirds of the records were botched, obsolete, damaged, or had been made by fakers like Sybill Trelawney. The few valid prophecies would have to be carefully cleaned, re-warded and stored on new shelves with a safer inventory tracking system. Also, the people involved in Prophetic & Oracular Pronouncements would have to be warned, as they should have been per the Law & Treaties in vigor.

x----------x

The Time Room was promptly locked down in a panic when the Dark Fae expert occultist saw what kinds of Anathema against Nature the depraved human traitors had been working on. Some were building Time-Turners with a 12, 24 or 36 hour capacity in the hopes of getting a full Stygian day of extra loose time to accomplish projects and missions. On other benches were the drawings and parts for a permanent Temporal Gateway that would allow to send energy (communications), items and even living beings into either past or future, and stay there indefinitely.

Now, there were plenty of Fae races and sub-races that had innate temporal abilities, but they also had inborn instincts on how to use these Powers safely, without destabilizing the fabric of Reality and the three Energy Weaves. The bumbling human fools had no such safeguards, nor any desires to develop such self-restraint any time soon. And sending things 'permanently' into the eddies of Time was just asking for chaotic events or entities from the Void to come calling, and not in a happy way.

Coming as close to a snarl of disdain as his high breeding and noble-born class would allow, the Unseelie archmage ordered "Seal this room tighter than a vordak's grip on his urn! I want nothing to move in, out, through or across this space or the connective planes in the vicinity until the Sidhe Courts have sent professionals to help sterilize this pit of perfidy."

x----------x

The next hall was completely devoid of anything visible except some odd, antiquated stonework amphitheater in the middle of which stood stone stairs covered in lichen and fungi, leading up to a flat pedestal some fifteen feet wide. Atop the flat perch stood the ruins of a partially crumbled stone arch, in a rough megalithic style that reminded of the ancient druids, from before the Roman conquest, some 2,000 years ago.

The Unseelie expert took one look at the place and immediately turned around, calling out "Not in my life! How the bloody Hells is it that these fool humans are still alive, mostly sane, and not corrupted into mutated beasts lower and crasser than their birth states? Shut this room and keep it sealed until the Sidhe Courts send an Anointed Emissary to perform cleansing rituals on it! And let it be known that any who touched that Unspeakable depravity MUST undergo a full cleanse and purge before rejoining their home base and organization. I will not have an infestation of Netherim larvae crawling around the Realms on my watch! Woe betide the entire Blood-Law of the ill-aborted cur, his bitch mother and his she-whore grand-mother that spawned his Line if he dares to challenge my word!"

Without bothering to ask questions above their pay grades, education, and ranks inside their mercenary groups, the minotaurs and ogres physically searched for and shut all the hidden doors around the amphitheater by welding them with silver solder and locking in place chains of iron, copper and alchemically molded rock salt. The war-priests and shamans added clerical Seals of their Faiths, invoking the protections of Minos and Gruumsh to bar this room from mortal access until the Sidhe had ruled on its case.

x----------x

It was an angry and bellicose Unseelie Arbiter that was now stalking the corridors, twin swords of living shadows flickering in his hands in tune to his inner malice. The Dark Fae had his fill of humans and their inbred contempt for the Natural Order of Yggdrasil's Boughs, and yet the Multiverse seemed particularly intent on making his tedious day even worse.

The 'poor' Fae followed the sounds of wrecking masonry, discharging magicks and occasional howl of pain until he reached the new jagged hole in the wall, right next to the official door that lead into the hall of psychomancy, mnemonics and soul magicks. The moment he walked into the dark, shadow wreathed room, he knew that the fine balance between the species of the Earth and its adjoining Realms had shifted irreversibly many a century ago, never to be rectified.

In three wide crystal tubes set in a triangle formation, each going from a masonry base to the ceiling of the room, floated rounded aberrations kept alive and pliable by the sustention fluid in which they dwelt. Or so the fool humans thought. Who in the roots of Sylvanus Oaksire was it that was depraved and stupid enough to think that these simple crystal and liquid contraptions would ever suffice to hold and contain THESE things of the True Darkness?

"A human! I need one of the workers from this department! Now!" Turning towards the bulbous creature nearest him, he thought its shape wasn't right, that it was missing a few things, even thought the wrinkled, cortex-like appearance and four dangling tentacles underneath were the expected norm. Maybe they weren't mature? Nobody knew if they had an incubation or infancy cycle, so it was possible some unlucky moron had stumbled upon a larval pod or something...

A minotaur sergeant arrived, looking expectantly at the Unseelie noble with amused brown eyes and a smirk on his oxen features. Pursing his lips as he frowned mightily at the entity twice his height, the Fae was obliged to relent. One did not dispute a minotaur's mercantile nature, nor their inbred addiction for trading and haggling on everything, without a genuine reason. Sighing in despondency, the extra-planar noble took out a handful of platinum coins to pay the mercenary for his prize. Taking the coins with an even wider smirk, the furry horned humanoid put a hand into his short brown hair, right under his armor's chest plate, all the way up to his elbow as the appendage disappeared into the famed 'dimensional fur' that all minotaurs learned how to cast and employ from childhood. Pulling out the complete, mostly healthy if unconscious, human wizard by the left foot, the minotaur shook him out like a cheap rug before dropping him in a rumpled disarrayed heap at the feet of his temporary client, then bowing mockingly and leaving for other quarry.

Sighing anew as he looked to the heavens, the Unseelie waved the pinkie finger of his left hand to make the sloppy figure levitate into a conjured chair, sitting him properly so the soul-chains and steel spikes he conjured through his ankles and wrists would hold him safely. These buggers were of the slippery sort, and he would be the laughing stock of his Court if he allowed this lowly specimen of the species to escape, let alone harm him. And with what was inside this hall, the Fae would be damned before he let the human have a chance at breaking the tubes to set free the horrors within.

Using a special medical spell that caused as much a physical as mental reaction to awaken the criminal, the Fae hid his dark pleasure at the surprise and fear he saw play out in the man's gray eyes as he awoke from whatever the minotaur had done to make him sleep. The few moments of weakness before full awareness were the only thing the Unseelie needed to delve into the poor sod's mind with an ease that Albus Dumbledore would never have thought possible in any being that wasn't himself, let alone a species other than human, despite all the legends of the Fae peoples' accomplishments in the mental disciplines.

Barely a minute was all that the Arbiter needed to find the information and promptly regret for the rest of his life that his prisoner had indeed known what was happening in here, although he had no idea of the actual nature of the three beings that floated serenely in the fluidic tubes. The room was the private laboratory and pet project of the Head Unspeakable since the founding of the Welsh Wiccan Ministry of Magic, in the human calendar's year 1000ad. Nobody knew why that was, only that it was written in the departmental charter, which was annexed to the Ministry's own founding documents and signed by the Britannic King, Arthur Pendragon, and the archmage of the Isles, Myrrdyn Emrys. The Unspeakables had these foul beasts in custody for a millenia and still didn't know the truth of their existence, let alone what doom they could truly spell for all on Earth if the rest of their population came to forcibly succor them.

A slow, languid movement in the corner of his eye caught the nobleman's attention, making him turn in anxious apprehension towards the trio of tubes, dreading what he would find. And, yes, there it was, that feeling of dread that pooled in the pit of his stomach, along with acid and fear.

Held aloft in the liquid by its salinity, density and eldritch eddies of its own in-commensurable mind, was an entity of such psionic skills and raw Power that it would take the entire Unseelie Court a week to subdue it enough to make it want to parley or leave. Not injured, not truly damaged except for scratches and a few mental ecchymosis, just no longer interested in wasting time, effort and mind-power on something that was too recalcitrant for the profit the creature thought to obtain in subjugating them easily.

And there were THREE of them in the same room.

What in Dagda's rigid bark had the humans done to this world?

As if to mock his consternation even worse, a slight feel of indolent amusement emanated from the trio of beings, coming through three distinct mind-voices that the Fae had no trouble sensing, or identifying, as the genuine monsters of nightmares that he had learned about in his schooling and military training. He was about as powerless as a muggle before Teeamath, dreaded queen of evil dragons, and they all knew it beyond doubt, none more than himself.

The three floating brains were not 'cognivores', despite that it was the species and biology the human knaves had indicated in their archives for centuries. These beings did not 'eat' thoughts, memories, minds or souls. No, they used their almighty inborn and deliberately refined psionics to enter all neural systems in their vicinity, up to nearly 10,000,000 kilometers for the eldest of their kindred, and reap a fully empathic and magical copy of all cognitive processes, memories, emotions, instincts and spiritual leanings their victims had. Then they shunted this information without any degradation or edition through a psychic network that spanned the Multiverse, into all the planes, dimensions, connective demi-planes and Realities so that their galactic empire could better conquer and rule from the depths of the Deep Ethereal whence they were born.

These beings were 'Grell'.

Large floating masses of muscle, eyeless but with a large curved calcified beak and a dozen long, prehensile tentacles covered with thin poisoned barbs, all ending in a sharp, pointed chitin cone that could stab through humans' forged plate armor, or wreck a wooden cart. These beings were nothing less than giant brains that floated on their own whims and psionics, just like beholders and Illithids. While they could live alone or in clusters, most Grell preferred a single form of life; they served as the guards and signal boosters of the Elder Brains, the giant cortex at the center of an Illithid city. Their innate cortical physiognomy made them particularly suited to serve as scanners, antennae and relay-hubs in a psychic community like the Mind Flayers built, preferring to ally with these purple, octopus-faced humanoids rather than Aboleth, Chuul, Youggian Cyclops, Neogi or other Aberrations that had come from the Far Realms, Wild Space, Youggoth or some of the other, weirder Outer Planes.

Grell ate murderously, consuming both animals and 'people' or 'higher sentient' beings, except for the brains which were poisonous to their biology. This made them ideal partners and guards for the Illithids who ate nothing but brains or brain-like creatures and plants, mostly of their own creation too. Thusly, Grell could serve and interact with an Elder Brain in its tank and manipulate the Illithid tadpoles as they were both toxic to consume. This gave the Illithid-kin beings a sense of security and comradeship that they could not form with any other species or race, even amongst those artificial species, races and mutations that the Illithid themselves had manufactured for slavery or food.

An adult Grell was such a powerful natural sensor of psionics and magics that it could detect a living being up to one million kilometers away, and start distinguishing its level of evolution, mindset and emotions from one hundred thousand kilometers away. Some of the most monstrous Grell known in the history of the Fae Sidhe Courts had been able to sense or communicate up to one hundred million kilometers away with fully muggle entities, to mentally sense their intent and level of evolution, and to determine if they would make good slaves, or just good food for them and their Illithid partners.

Which meant that if there were Grell in here, then there were Illithid somewhere on Earth or in the solar system around them.

Fucks! How in the Runes of Azuth had they missed this?

"You should have some tea, Fae," a slow, languid voice echoed powerfully through the Arbiter's mind as easily as if it had spoken in the air. "I do believe that it would relax your nerves. You seem to be, as the British humans say, a mite peckish."

Looking in the Grell's face, he could now see that the three beings had let go of the surface illusions that had hidden their features and true natures for centuries, showing him what they were without a care in the world. Since each one could put a small village on its knees just by emitting a mental sneeze, the Unseelie noble could really understand why they weren't the ones concerned by anything that was happening to the Welsh Wiccan Ministry of Magic.

Department of Mysteries his smooth, well toned posterior, indeed!

The Grell on the far right of the triangle formation idly gestured with a tentacle, gently using some telekinesis to reveal an alcove hidden behind a deeply enchanted curtain of crafted chitin that was all too recognizable as the product of Grell alchemy. From inside the alcove, the cerebral monster retrieved, of all things, a wooden rolling service cart with two tiers. The lower shelf had a full English tea set, complete with alcohol burner to keep the silver kettle warm, porcelain cups & saucers, silver flatware, white linen napkins, and small glass condiment pots.

The poor Fae almost lost conscience when he saw the top of the cart. On the higher shelf was a modern, all aluminum, 1984 Panasonic TR1200S boombox with not only radio and cassette tape, but also a 10 inch color TV built-in. A small crystal apparatus next to the boombox was plugged into the electronic device, serving as both its electrical source and signal relay to capt the free-wave or cable signals from a hub inside the alcove.

A telekinetic beam began to move cups and saucers to serve tea for four persons, each serving disappearing it a burst of micro-portation spell to appear inside the tube of its recipient. It now averred that the tubes were not in fact full of liquid, just normal breathable air, if a bit colder and more humid than normal, like would be found in the depths of the Underdark or Far Realm. The Fae received his serving numbly, barely taking hold of the saucer, cup and spoon when they appeared in thin air at chest height before him.

Another of the floating cannibalistic cerebrum gestured with a tentacle to emit a brief pulse of psionics, switching on the TV to the international stations. The noble Unseelie had precious little knowledge of the muggles and their mass medias, since he actually lived most of his life in the Border Ethereal connective demi-plane, with his family and society. However, even a sheltered, pampered, visiting dignitary such as he knew what CNN was, and what it did in life.

It would figure that the bloody Grell, great floating brains that they were, had become addicted to the planets first Continuous News Network. This thing really was the 'Idiot Box' that made all peoples idiotic and lazy!

"Ssshush! Keep your thoughts quieter! Larry King Live is starting. Oh! We have scones and jams, in the butler's pantry, if you have a small urge to snack." The tea-serving Grell mentioned as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"You have a butler's pantry? Do you have the butler too?" sarcastically asked the poor, mentally addled Fae as he sipped his high quality tea, raising an eyebrow of surprise at the exquisite taste.

"Of course we have a serving area, and the servant that handles its chores. We are a highly civilized and educated species, after all. And this IS the Ministry of Magic for England's monarchy. It would be poor showing on our parts if we couldn't entertain the rare occasional guest that stumbles upon our abode." replied a very obviously amused pseudo-god of psions and mental almight in a snobby, aristocratic tone that was projected by its soul-voice quite clearly.

"Hush! Larry has Bill Gates on his set tonight! I want to see what he has in store for Microsoft in the coming months. The humans' new silicon based computers are quite the marvel, compared to our bio-neural systems, and certainly far less prone to infections or parasites." Demanded the leader of the trio, as he fiddled telekinetically with the crystal relay's dials to boost reception.

"Euh, not to be impolite or anything," asked the flabbergasted Fae, "But aren't you guys blind? As in, you have no eyes or photo-receptors whatsoever? How do you see the television image? Or do you just listen as if it were a regular radio?"

Giving a weird movement of its tentacles that was the species' equivalent to a careless shrug, the Grell with the snobby tone replied "We don't know. It appears that the cathodic tube inside the television emits radiations at such a high strength and wavelength that they get picked up by our natural electro-reception ability that serves as our sight. This strange phenomenon even allows us to see in colors, almost the same spectrum as our Illithid partners used to show us via telepathy. Quite strange, truly. And marvelous too, as it allows us to view the world as other do without mind-raping them, for a change."

"Yes, but it only works on cathodic tube technology. The newly developed liquid crystal sets that the Japanese are beginning to sell don't give us that effect. We got one, about seven years back, and it really didn't work at all for us." Their tea server explained in a distracted tone as he used a tentacle to physically move the spoon in his cup to mix the honey and cream properly. "Very good sound, true, but we couldn't see anything anymore. What use was that? So we gave it to Croaker for his office. Don't know if he kept it or not, and we don't care. Now hush! Larry and Bill are on!"

"Egads! What madhouse did I fall into?" mentally wondered the Unseelie as he sipped imported elvish tea, using the mundane act to anchor is failing sanity to this world.

"Quiet down, over there! He's talking about the launch of Office 3.0, coming on August 30th," snapped an annoyed snobby Grell before munching on a suddenly present jam covered scone.

Seeing nothing else that he could do, the Unseelie noble conjured himself a plush armchair to sit in as he sipped tea and enjoyed a hot cinnamon scone that appeared on a small plate next to him.

Thank Sylvanus for memory extractions and pensieves, otherwise the Court wouldn't believe a word he said when he returned. His report about this job would probably see him interred in an asylum, but he could use the vacation at this point. It certainly couldn't be worse that what he was doing now, and would be much more mentally restful anyways, which he truly needed.

{ HP } --- { Tear it apart! } --- { HP }

Hogwarts had been empty of all humans that Saturday night, with only the house-elves and ghosts to keep the castle safe. The team of ward-masters that was supposed to be doing the survey for the eventual repairs of the power sink and mythalar pillars had been not been on site, since there was no functional Ministry to sign the contracts, issue payments or validate the job briefs. It was also why there were no human teachers either; no government officials to make the contracts or take the oaths demanded by the positions.

The 140 house-elves present inside Hogwarts were lethargic without any beings but the few animals living in the Forbidden Forest to occupy them mentally. The poor servile entities had no official master anymore, since neither Headmaster, Heads of Houses or Board of Governors remained from the sequence of purges the queen had committed against the Welsh fanatics. As such, the elves were exceedingly happy to see the dwarves arrive in the depth of night, treating them to hot tea, coffee and baked goods of all sorts as if their lives (or sanity) depended on it. The dwarf captains had no troubles from them, and in fact easily obtained their willing collaboration in combing through the antiquated fortress for hidden rooms, passages and illegal modifications made over the thousand years the building existed. The elves also helped to remove the dwarven soldiers from traps or ferry them to the infirmary as needed when things turned sour, later on.

The dwarven soldiers never had an easier task of taking over a fortified estate, until it came time to sort out the many secret passages and booby-traps left over from centuries of headmasters that used the place as their playground, rather than as venerable public institution. The ill-built traps and abandoned de-cycling wards did a number on the bearded folk, landing more than three dozen in their field hospital with wounds that ranged from annoying to grievous but nothing fatal. The troop's priests and healers were kept busy through the night and all of Sunday before the venerated castle was declared clean and safe. After that, it was mostly just cleaning and repairs to the venerable masonry that the contractors hadn't started since the Ministry fell before it could sign and pay for the work to be done.

x----------x

The goblin had taken over Hogsmead with gusto, the two thousand armored soldiers becoming a cause of nightmares for the Welsh wizards who had never realized just how many war-ready men the underground nation had on hand.

Their sectarian government had always taught them that the goblins were an inferior -servant- species barely above house-elves that just happened to rebel once in a while. The Ministry however never admitted that at each of these rebellions, it was the humans who had lost the battle, and quite badly. They also never reminded their people that goblins were written into the Magna Carta as sovereign nation, but allied and integrated fully by Treaty inside the British Empire as honored and noble Royal Peers of the Realms.

There would be a lot of humans learning old things anew on the morrow, come Sunday.

Those who survived, at any rate. There were a few foolish souls who tried to resist the Royal Warrant of queen Elizabeth II when the goblins presented it to justify seizing peoples and properties alike. These morons thought that they could just cast an 'Avada Kedavra' at a goblin soldier like it was a rabid dog and no consequences would happen. Well, they realized right quick that a goblin can swing his ax thrice in the time it takes a human to shout the killing curse. It also meant they wound up armless and legless when they were arrested for attempted murder versus lawmen and sedition against the Britannic crown. Even if these fools hadn't been actual traitors or fanatics, trying to kill anybody in the expeditionary troops was a one-way ticket to The Tower of London, with a VIP position on the pikes atop the battlements already reserved.

On top of the sheer size of the mission force was the fact the goblins had brought forty house-elves from Gringotts bank to help pillage, sort and pack the belongings of the citizens. Humans were being pulled from their homes, scanned for illness or mind-control systems, then portkeyed to a holding area on a small Scottish island, at an alarming pace. That allowed the goblins to finish searching the vacant town in peace, while the queen's own sorcerers triaged the people with veritaserum and fealty oaths at their own rhythm, in the island's newly built prison-camp.

x----------x

The halflings had suffered a triple paradox like none other in the existence of their Cooperative.

Firstly, they were willingly helping the British monarch while they were a fierce Independence & Democracy movement that wanted to abolish the crown and titled Houses.

Secondly, St-Mungo's was the place where the Welsh extremists hit back the hardest as the criminal Unspeakables had a secret two-level base in the foundations of the building, and they were not giving up their power to anybody. This led to brutal fighting at such speed and intensity that it surprised everybody involved, from the halfling militiamen to the doctors, to the felons and all else around. This was especially true when some angry patients, barely recovering from the manipulations of Dumbledore, used their walkers or wheelchairs to reach the apothecary shops or potions cabinets to use whatever they could lay hands on as missiles to pelt the traitors, in support of their healers and the halfling lawmen.

The level of poisonous fumes was too much for the wards to filter, thus giving raise to the third paradox of the night. Every spell-user and house-elf in the building was saved from death by toxic gases or chemical fires by the quick intervention of the muggle firefighters and HAZMAT teams of the Greater London metropolitan area. The mess was such an apocalyptic sight that the minotaurs, ogres, dwarves and goblins all complained loudly that the halflings had hogged all the fun jobs like the stunted, rounded, selfish beasts that they were rumored to be. Everybody laughed at THAT declaration, even the hobbits, once the spell injuries, burns, poison ailments and shock had been dealt with. These guys had certainly earned the hazard pay the crown had promised to any who got injured in the fights.

It was that Sunday morning, at brunch, that queen Elizabeth II made a decision that would set-off the groups outside the small Welsh Wiccan sect to react against her purges and normalization of the magical side of the Realms. Instead of having the muggle firefighters obliviated as per the Statute of Secrecy in place since the 1500's, she had them made 'muggle-in-the-know' and received their blood-sworn fealty oaths signed with blood-quills that had their own internal magicks to permit mundanes and non-humanoids to sign contracts with Gringotts or the governments.

Many of the usually silent majority of the wizarding population who thought magic-users were in fact superior or more blessed than muggles saw this act as the last straw that broke the camel's back. By dinner time on Sunday evening, things were already changing for the very worse.

{ HP } --- { End of an Era } --- { HP }

The rest of the magical British Realms, colonies and Commonwealth were not faring much better, and some of the troubles had spread to Europa, Slavia, Russia, the Mediterranea shorelines and the near sectors of Africa and Arabia. Even the vast Americas and Canada had gotten some spill-over by unlawful portkey travelers, several hundreds just dropping unannounced in the middle of wherever their rushed targeting had put them. When the purge began to spread during the daylight hours on Sunday, the exodus of fanatics, extremists and rebels got even more pronounced as many hundreds more got warning messages from comrades, or wards on their unlawful caches of weapons & components as they got raided by soldiers. In some cases, entire families of the middle and lower social classes abandoned their jobs and homes to leave in a panic.

Being superstitious by their botched education, these working-class and lower-management types fled what they saw as a country falling to 'muggletomia', supposedly an 'infectious brain illness' denounced by Warlocks in the 13th century. This awful, incurable condition, made good and powerful wizards think that magicless or squib 'natural inferiors' actually deserved respect and social considerations. Since the condition was thought to be spread by uncontrolled effluves wafting from the soul-aura of the affected wizards, the only safe thing to do was to either kill the afflicted or flee to safety, in cloaked, unmarked dwellings.

x----------x

The White Council of Edinburgh, devotional angelic sect to the dead god Jesus Christ, was legally disbanded and forbidden as an extremist sect in the same vein as the Welsh Wiccan.

Unfortunately, all the known members of the Senior Council had managed to leave Scotland before the queen's wizards got to their secret underground catacombs. On Wednesday evening, the fanatical christian wizardry sect had officially declared its new home in Argentina, with the help of the local Kobold Dynasty.

The worse blow was when they revealed to the entire magical population that they had committed parleys with the muggle government of the country, to the point of revealing that their Lord Jesus had died 900 years ago, but that a conclave of his remaining angels could resurrect him, as he had undergone once before. They had presented the muggles with four living Celestials, among whom was the Archangel Danael of Concord. This immediately put the entire Argentinian muggle government behind the sect, with all the financing of a tax-harvesting system, plus an army of 120,000 trained men in motorized vehicles to support their evangelical crusades across the Earth.

The very first edict the newly revealed 'Exalted Council of Christian White Magicks' was to declare the British Empire as heretical and faithless, excommunicating them from the Christian Dominion and the Grace of God, in this world and the next.

What they got in response was that the Catholic Pope in Rome denounced them as Heretical and Treasonous because they were following the Fallen angels of Lucifer Morningstar, the Denarian sect, who had caused the war that killed Jesus and destroyed Heaven. For this, the Pope decreed that all of Argentina was relapsed from the Faith of the Christian Bible and willful accomplices in the murder and desecration of their once Living God. The Pope called upon all good catholics to fight this aberration and repel the Denarians from their lives and souls, thus starting a planetary conflict between the two groups of worshipers and their respective allied nations. This revelation even started a schism inside Argentina's parliament and military command, causing the White Council to publicly execute doubters by burning them at the stake as heretics, thusly precipitating the civil collapse of their host country.

Queen Elizabeth II's response was both immediate and implacable; she abjured the Christian god and his diverse churches, swearing allegiance to Yggdrasil, Dagda, Cosme and Gaia as the foundational deities of Nature, Time and the Multiverse. Britain would officially return to druidism, witchcraft and hedge-craft as its Faiths and religions of reference in life, schools, hospitals and government. The queen's decree from the throne had such a profound effect on the National Sovereignty Wards of the country that thousands of churches of dozens of divinities not aligned on Yggdrasil and his children suddenly lost their wards or consecrations in a thunderous flash of conflicting Powers, as the lawful authority of Britannia asserted itself upon the nation without compromise.

This caused a secondary exodus of many human, half-human and non-humanoid beings who had been in the titled clergy or devotional ranks of other Living Gods whose Creed and Causes were not aligned with either Nature, druidism, or the English monarchy's temporal & spiritual Right-of-Rule. Fearing that they would be arrested and executed as traitors, or branded and deported in shame as had occurred to murders, rapists and arsonist by the tens of thousands throughout the 1600's, 1700's and 1800's, many ordinary citizens or devout users of Channeling from other cults decided to leave British lands while the borders were still passable. The result was an intense week of sustained, chaotic traffic in the ether as apparitions, portkeys, gateways and planes-walking occurred pell-mell all over the Empire's many sectors, causing a rarefaction of magical Gifts, Talents and Skills in hundreds of professions. However, this migration of rebels and malcontents in return produced a beneficial consolidation of Faith, culture and loyalty towards the common society that the overly mixed population hadn't been able to follow anymore for a long time.

This renewed societal harmony would be put to good use by the Britannic government to modernize laws and simplify the ancient bureaucratic mess, starting by eliminating all the competing sectarian offices and ministries. The queen ordered to bring everything under a single Ministry of Magick that was legally a part of the London government, just as Inland Revenue or Interior & Security. Each existing ministry or department was split into internal sectors to deal with purely mundane issues or those involving some occult elements without having to switch buildings or personnel all the time. A lot of redundant forms and permits were abolished, with their necessary magical portions being simply added to the basic mundane forms that regulated these things for everybody. Doing something not expected by anybody outside her immediate cadre of personal advisers, the queen ordered that all the revisions of legal texts and philosophical positions that seated these laws be subordinated to The Old Ways and follow the High Traditions of the Darkes in all magical, religious and mundane matters, across the board.

That meant that Chartered Families and Houses with a formal Clanhold structure would become an integral part of the societal, legal and political landscape of mundane Britain again by the end of the year 1992, in time for Yule celebrations. This change would astonish the general population on the mundane side, especially the legal scholars who might have protested, if they hadn't been brought into the mess as 'muggle-in-the-know' despite blood-curdling screams of protests by hundreds of pressure groups, especially from outside of the British Empire. As it were, with several of the most renowned law, regulation and arbitration experts of England, Scotland, Ireland and Commonwealth member nations supporting the move in the mass media of either side of the magical divide, the changes proved easy to pass. Especially since the queen had judiciously decreed that the entire tax system would be remodeled to fit the new societal entities, with the entire bracketing starting collection at a minimum revenue of 28,000 pounds per annum for a single person who lived alone, reaching a fixed maximum of 25% of the person's totaled incomes for the ultra-rich at the top. Corporations based in British lands or owned abroad by wholly British membership were stunned to be astrained to the same bracketing, giving them on average a tax reduction of 10 to 15 percentage points versus the actual ladder.

At the same time, Elizabeth II had the entirety of the existing laws, regulations and protocols of the United Kingdom, active colonies, and willing Commonwealth members, undergo a process of rationalization and simplification to cut almost 30% of the messy red tape. The goal was to make sure that laws, permits and law-enforcement were rendered equitably, in a similar fashion across the Empire and internal partners, instead of being the patchwork of infighting jurisdictions it had become over the last five centuries. Most of the orders the queen passed saw their massive workload becoming reality eased by the novelty of the Internet that linked computers with scanners and printers across the entire globe. Even the most traditional wizards were agog before the marvelous invention, since nobody liked having a face full of soot after a Floo call. With something that absolutely anybody could utilize, regardless of magic, species, age or wealth, the changes to the societal order, politics, military and economy had a decent chance of happening without causing any truly damaging fracturing of the country.

The very clear military victories of the queen's wizards and allied troops had been enhanced by the willing offer of fealty oaths by the Council of Dark Watchers, the Librarians of Venerable Antiquity, and Freemason Faithful Guild's of Scotland who converted to Mystra's Family as their referent Faith. The British division of the Sororitam Naturam Pieta Ordum and its dozens of affiliated covens & conclaves, made a public declaration that, even though they were granted 'passive support' from the fact they were already druidic, they would in fact perform the Fealty ceremony with the other groups, at Glastonbury Tor. This series of public religious, legal and political alliances gave the populations of the entire magical world a powerful counter-point against which to judge the fanatical decrees of the White Council's new form and representatives. Any traction the angelist crusaders had thought to garner inside Britain had gotten ripped away just as fast as they had built it, but without hopes for a recovery, and the Pope in Rome was shredding apart whatever they had tried to get anywhere else on the planet.

The English queen was simply too good at modernizing her government, and too quick to effectuate the changes for them to cut her off. The fact she had made changes that specifically benefited the poorest, the working classes and the lower white-collar classes of society meant that the christian sect's traditional arguments that they were the protectors of the indigents and poor no longer had any credibility in Britain. They had their legs cut-out from under them within a week of their proud moment of victory over the credulous Argentinian government, then a hard fall and nothing else in front of them.

Summer vacations 1992; The Black Blood-Law unites again

()

Late August 1992  
Gringotts Bank  
London, The Britannic Realms

Lucius Malfoy guided his wife and son through the lobby of Gringotts, directly towards the rear, aiming for the corridor leading to the Family conference rooms. They had a pressing appointment this Tuesday morning, and one simply didn't make the Lord Black wait, no matter how young or inexperienced he may be. It didn't matter what had happened last week across the British Empire; that was no reason to indispose one of the most noble and senior Houses of the Land, the way the dishonorable Prewetts and Weasleys would do. Such uncouthness would NOT be associated with the Malfoy or Black names - ever.

In a very dramatic and clandestine fashion, the muggle queen had used the allied kingdoms of other humanoid species to finish breaking down the obsolete Welsh Wiccan Ministry. This event was long in the coming, foreseen by the Lords of the Noble Houses for several generations already, no matter what the Warlocks of the Wizengamot bleated about. All that was lacking for the purging process to begin was a trigger, something to give the English crown the justification to use heavy-handed tactics to get the job done in a way that couldn't be undone by extremists. This had finally happened with Dumbledore being revealed, then others kept piling on without ever learning the lesson to give up their bigotries or depravities. Now, with the purge done and the Welsh Wiccan sect officially disbanded, their shared country would be much better. All three Malfoys had agreed upon this fact, when the news of events had been published in the papers and Wizarding Wireless on this past Monday morning.

Lucius had dressed to his exacting standards, not needing anything new, as was the particular wont of men of station. One high-style suit fits all, sort of male mentality, despite the social situation they were attending. Narcissa however had put on her best formal robes and shawl, with a discrete touch of make-up, just enough to enhance her already ethereal beauty that made many believe she had drunk Fae blood-elixir in youth. Besides them, Draco walked in firm determined strides, not afraid of the Lord Black whom he knew far better than his parents, and seemingly having come to his own conclusions about the goblins too, as he was no longer intimidated by them. The boy had dressed formally in terms of robes, but had not primped or pampered himself as he would have done last year, stating that superficial things like aesthetics and beauty products wouldn't influence Harry Peverell – Black – Potter's decisions towards anybody.

Lucius had been both proud and worried about how much his son already knew of their newly installed House Lord, but could not change the situation anymore. Especially not after the Wizengamot meetings, trials and public battles with drawn weapons the child had been a part of for the past year. Polite invitations for tea or lunch at Malfoy Manor had been made since the child had attained his emancipation and titles, but he had always set back the meeting. Never refused or denied, just pushed back due to ongoing events which, admittedly, was understandable as even the Malfoys would have been put at odds to receive him on some occasions, like last Yule. The two parents were weary of this systematic push-away that seemed to be a discrete social and political signal, but Draco had waved their concerns off, saying Harry was simply uneasy in this new world, especially with Dumbledore's crimes, then the Ministry collapse and the queen getting involved. Potter was simply overwhelmed by the changes, so he wanted to get a true feel of his new 'home' in the magical world before letting more people into his life. That he had opened up the way he did to Neville Longbottom, Susan Bones, Hermione Dagworth-Granger, Nymphadora Tonks and himself so quickly on the Hogwarts Express, then kept it up during the school year, was actually surprising Draco in its own terms, which he had admitted.

Since they had no choice but to rely on their in-house 'expert', the two parents went along with the flow of events, but kept a hand near their wands and portkeys, just in case. Narcissa had felt the ancient Blood-Wards of Black Manor raise to siege-strength weeks ago, when the property's existence was almost wiped from her mind, not helping to build trust. If the child was already paranoid enough to put his home on a war footing without publicly reported attacks or visible enemies, what would he do next? There was only so much that recovering from Dumbledore's sins and crimes could explain credibly, even with the old bastard still alive. Fear was a very bad adviser, and a destructive mistress; one could not prosper nor thrive in the throes of such crippling emotional tempest.

x----------x

A male goblin guard stood in full armor by the door to the Black conference room, eyeing the Malfoys balefully as they approached, as if sizing them for a spit to roast on. Surprising his parents, Draco stopped four feet away from the soldier to speak with him.

"Sentry. We are honored by your service. How goes the watch?" The blond child asked in a firm, unafraid voice, as he looked the soldier directly in the eyes.

Making a smirk full of teeth, the goblin gleefully replied "It's a fine morning indeed, young Heir Malfoy. I've bagged me a reporter from one of the lesser tabloids out of Glasgow, that tried to breach the Black conference room. The Lord Black was most pleased of it, paying Gringotts a pretty coin to house the cur for a fortnight in our goals, to properly teach him the meaning of 'private Chartered Family affairs'. His Lordship's trust rejoices us, the goblin peoples of Gringotts."

Lucius was having a private, and very silent, internal conniption as he saw his only son enter the critical reach of the goblin's weapons without a care in the world. He was even more aghast to hear the child address the entity as if it were normal and safe. Then the armored being actually replied, looking amused at it, too. What was the magical side of the Earth becoming?

Draco ignored his father's mini-breakdown in favor of smiling with all white teeth at the sentry, nodding approvingly as he declared "Well, that should make one more wizard with a better education than Hogwarts gave out until last year. We are much obliged for your service in this domain. Carry on the good work," the child declared in an affected tone of magnanimity.

With a toothier smile, the greatly amused goblin sentry gestured at the door, a small pulse of magic triggering the lock to let the panels pivot open safely. Draco walked in first, a small breach of protocol yes, but both of his parents were paralyzed behind him and he could smell Harry's tea wafting in the air. The black-haired runt really did have impeccable taste when it came to hot beverages, especially when he or Rehz prepared them. Being an avowed tea addict himself, Draco wouldn't let the occasion to partake in the luxurious drink pass by, and if his parent dilly-dallied too much, they could be content with the cheap peasants' brew instead.

The two Malfoy adults were released from their stupor by the bombastic "Cousin Drakey-Poo! How I missed your snobby, stuck-up attitude all these weeks on vacation! You just have to sit by me so we can catch up!" yelled out by their niece Nymphadora. The immediate shriek by her mother of "Nymphadora Tonks! Of all the things to do and say in this room! Haven't I raised you better than this, hellion? Apologize to your Lordly cousins for this misdemeanor immediately and sit down quietly! I don't care of you're 18 years old! Follow decorum or we'll be having words in the bathroom before the meeting even starts! Theodore, you big lug! Say something to that scamp of yours! It's not always my job to keep her in line!"

Whatever else Andromeda Tonks was about to remonstrate or threaten her wayward daughter with was lost in the twin laughter of two boys as both Draco and Harry Potter exploded in mirth at the poor woman's face, which did away Nymmy's last resolve so she burst out in laughter too. The elder woman was put in a bad spot as her Family's Lord was finding the deplorable mess amusing and siding with her daughter, who was now 18 years old and an adult anyways, so not really bound to listen or obey her anymore. And now her younger sister Narcissa, who saw everything, was smirking at her lack of proper control over her wayward child in a public setting. The bloody stuck-up bint would never let her and Ted live it down, she was sure of it.

Waving an indolent hand from the depths of the Lord's throne where he held court, Harry was far too amused to have any care for protocols, bowing and ring-kissing at present. The adults could get all stuffy and pompous if they insisted; he just wanted to see his friends and have a few rounds of tea in peace before handling the messy politics of Titled & Chartered Family affairs.

Pushing forward despite her instincts to stay away, Narcissa dared to approach her estranged sister to embrace her loosely, while looking over the woman's shoulder to her muggle-born husband. Both were very successful in their chosen careers as private attorneys, having a mixed clientele that made them wealthy in their own rights, even if it was only a shadow of what Andromeda could have if she had still been a Black by law. At least she hadn't been removed from the Family's Blood-Law, a small mercy for which Narcissa was quite grateful to her late uncle Orion; an unstable, unmitigated mongrel if ever there was one in the family's gnarled tree.

By the small brass nameplates on the conference table, The Tonks and Malfoys were seated together on one side of the long marble-topped furniture, with Nymmy and Draco in the middle to act as a buffer between the adults, so as to keep things polite and presentable. Harry's side of the table had Neville and Hermione on his left while Susan and her aunt Amelia would sit on his right. Lucius and Narcissa were aware of the god-parenthood ties with Longbottom and Bones, but didn't know what to think of the newly instated Lady Dagworth-Granger being present. As they weren't the senior title-holders in the meeting, nor the selected organizers, their opinion was not important at present, and probably not afterwards either, to be brutally honest.

{ HP } --- { Diseased fruits of a poisonous tree } --- { HP }

Young Harry Potter, truly 12 years old this time, sat in peace in his plush velvet upholstered throne, looking over the gathered proceedings with an indolent smirk hidden behind his porcelain cup of tea, the prominent House Black crest and motif indicating it was the room's private Family set being used again. The Malfoys hadn't witnessed this particular heirloom since their betrothal contract had been signed by their parents, and didn't know what it signified that the child-Lord had put it back in service. It was a clear sign of opulence, status and Powers that even the blind would see clearly though, and they had enough wisdom to appreciate the subtle play for what it meant. He was the Lord and senior, and every sip or morsel consumed in the room was done so by his will and authority alone. Slytherin subtlety at its best, and properly polite, too.

Narcissa almost had a heart infarction when she saw the old Black Manor house-elf Kreacher appear next to the boy, looking healthier, saner, and much better dressed than ever before in the classic three-piece suit with tailcoat worn by majordomo the world over for two centuries. Looking quietly dignified and businesslike, the elderly elf served the assembled guests beverages and small finger foods, including from the exclusive Master's Bar which Harry had opened. In fact, the child had an excellent bottle of German red wine being served to each of the six juveniles without ever asking the adults if they permitted it or not. By the way the kids took the proffered alcohol and saluted each other almost by reflex, it was an old ritual between them that nothing would change. The elf took out a second bottle of the same vintage to serve the older persons. Then the servile being almost created a scandal when he sat on a small but thickly padded armchair near the service counter, still visible and present as any of the official guests.

Clearing her throat in unease, Narcissa asked delicately "Forgive me Lord Black, but are you aware that one does not usually have the elves, or any hired staffers in fact, remain in the room during Family deliberations? It could accidentally enter them into oaths being made, or create breaches in privacy wards meant to affect only humans."

Harry only blinked both eyes at her once before countering in a soft, placid voice that was menacing all the same; "I have received more kindness, care and consideration from non-human species, or dead entities who were human in life, than from any living human, be they muggle or magical. If I had probant worries about who gets bound to me by oaths or wards today, I would have summoned only your house-elves and goblin account managers, not you great and mighty human adults who think the universe rotates around the tip of your wand."

Taking a slow sip of his tea as he slyly observed the winces of anxiety or silent outrage his words had caused, the 12 year old received the answers to many questions before the meeting was even fully engaged. "Let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen. There are three categories of people in this room presently. Those that are extensions of my own soul, those that I truly trust, and those that have yet to give me reasons, let alone proofs, as to why I should trust them. The elves and my familiar are my extensions, all beyond reproach. Those that I trust are all kids or were present inside the Gamot walls with wands drawn at my side, when Fudge and Crouch were destituted from their attempted Samhain 1991 putsch. That leaves you where, exactly, cousin?"

The sudden silence was stifling as the adults realized they had quite quickly forgotten just how battle-hardened and lethal the child-Lord was, and the usual put-downs and condescending tones of voice would not impress him any. In fact, Narcissa winced in abject fear as she understood the utterly gauche faux-pas she had committed towards the titular Head of the Black Family. The punishments he could call against her were awe-inspiring in how inhumane they could become, and had been in the past. Being legally disinherited or cast out magically would be the very least of her problems if he took umbrage to her existence.

A sudden huff of mirth from Neville Longbottom shattered the fragile silence like glass as he exclaimed with dubious envy "Damn! Again with the face! You have GOT to show me how to do that! It's just not fair that a reed-thin cutie like you gets to have the arm-ripping-beast's look when the athletic pudgy like me gets a face that just looks lost in the fog."

Narcissa oggled the newly elevated child-Lord (him too, dammit) with round eyes and gaping mouth as if he were a niffler that had formally declared it was giving up on hoarding shinies. The poor mother had no chance to respond to the non-sequitur that her own offspring was putting in his two Knuts unbidden.

"Honestly, Neville, it has nothing to do with body type but the state of your mind. Harry believes that he has the monetary, legal, political and magical Power to back his declarations, and if it comes to worse, he can just bash them with his Battlestaff. He knows bloodshed and suffering, and isn't shy about disbursing some to accomplish his goals; that's what's in his face. The day you start having confidence in yourself and your abilities from the harsh life you had, people will see that in you and back off just as fast. Susan and Hermione aren't far from achieving it, and given how much worse your life was, you really should have managed it sooner than them. Then again, they were one-way events, not actual fights were you shot back or punched out at them. When you live through that, or at least get some solid tutoring with a real pro, you'll get there fast enough."

Both Malfoy parents were mortified, anxious, and dreading the scandal their son's words would cause, and they could see that Andromeda and her husband Theodore had not expected this sort of reply coming from any of the children present. They had in fact obviously thought that the kids were present because Harry was being courteous towards his contemporaries, but all decisions would be done by the adults in the room. Probably even those things that concerned Harry directly, as he was still a novice at all the wizarding Family affairs. Well no, the kids weren't just present out of politeness or something similar; they were here because the new Lord valued their opinions and expected them to speak up for themselves and each other, especially when the adults tried to condescend or bypass one of them.

With the Malfoys, Tonks and Amelia Bones now well aware of the lay of the land, the subtle tones and underlying messages being exchanged by the kids as banter became clear as daylight. The real power-brokers in the room were all under 21 years of age, opinions to the contrary having neither influence nor value in the balance of things. Harry Potter had the senior chair, with Lord Longbottom and Lady Dagworth-Granger backing him with all the Powers they had, which was a considerable amount for each House, even the newly awakened one. This very well made it Harry's meeting, on his terms, and the adults had better remember it as if their social and political positions depended on it, since they most certainly did.

The Wizengamot was defunct and the queen was not inclined to rebuild the defective structure, preferring to merge the magical titles, ranks, styles and positions within the muggle Peerage in the House of Lords at Westminster, rather than risk another bigotry-fueled schism down the line. In such a system, Harry Potter and Hermione Granger were starting ahead of everybody, and would enjoy great advantages for years as they knew the muggle side better, so the crown would call on them to guide them much more often than other House Lords. And that meant that any Family or House that wanted to have good words spoken for them by Harry Potter had better get on his good side right away, instead of wasting time on bigotries and obsolete mentalities.

{ HP } --- { Gnarled Black roots and branches } --- { HP }

"Alright, people!" Harry called out softly, his voice rarely even reaching normal strength as he demonstrated an iron will and self-control that made the adults realize they wouldn't be able to play the usual game of making the boy have an emotional outburst to use as proof he was unfit to lead them, or the House by extension. As long as he was more calm, disciplined and orderly than them, none of their protests about his immaturity or lack of experience would fly for anything.

"I have called you here to this meeting under the aegis of the House Peverell, as the most senior Titled and Chartered House of the British Realms, as well as Royal Peer of Britannia. We shall now intone the Familial oaths of loyalty and secrecy, as written on the sheets Rehz will now pass for your signature by bood-quill." Glaring mildly at the Malfoys and Tonks, he added "Do note that each person has their own sheet, so there will be no adult attempting to declare exemptions or bypass as legal guardian, Proxy or Regent. Each soul will give its own oath, or leave the room. In which case, their self-styled 'responsible' adults can leave too. Such is my will."

Swallowing a great deal of bruised pride and anxiety, all adults read the Family oath, wincing at how tightly worded the bonds were. The child had taken example on the new Ministerial oaths that the queen had set in place, removing old bigotries or specism while making certain that the Family and House structures were clearly labeled and abided without loopholes. Seeing no easy alternatives, and certainly no profitable ones, the adults signed their oath sheets, followed by the younger persons who had all waited to see if Magyck refused one as Traitor or Oath-Breaker before giving their pledges. That they had all done this by common accord, silently agreed right before the meeting started, unsettled the adults even more. The children had been fully prepared to let someone die cruelly when they tried stupidly to lie on a magically binding oath, as if they genuinely thought any of the adults present were that badly educated in Blood-Law and magick.

Kreacher recovered the oath sheets with a discrete snap, replacing them with a thick folio that would be the working document for the meeting. Everything was already classed by order of time and magical ritualistic sequence to be done without any hitches.

1- The confirmation of Lord Neville Longbottom as god-brother to Harry Potter

2- The acceptance of the Longbottom Family as extended kin to House Potter

3- The confirmation of Heiress Susan Bones as god-sister to Harry Potter

4- The acceptance of the Bones Family as extended kin to House Potter

5- The formal confirmation of the Malfoy Family within the House of Black

6- The formal return of Andromeda Tonks within the House of Black

7- The new integration of the Tonks Family within the House of Black's Blood-Law

8- The decree of House Alliance between Peverell and Dagworth-Granger

9- The decree of Lord Neville Longbottom as Heir Apparent of House Peverell

10- The decree of Heiress Susan Bones as Heir Apparent of House Potter

11- The decree of Nymphadora Tonks as Heir Apparent of House Black

12- The plans for the modernization of all Family & House legal structures now required by the changes being instituted by queen Elizabeth II and the centralized governance of Britannia. This included an official decree that Houses Peverell, Black and Potter would now abide The Old Ways and follow the High Traditions of the Darkes as the basis of their laws, Faith and philosophy throughout all matters.

* A light luncheon would be served in the conference room at 13:00pm.

13- The ritual for the establishment of the Peverell Black – Potter – Longbottom – Bones – Tonks – and Dagworth-Granger House Alliance. This would allow them to create a set of centralized offices that would manage the purchases, sales and hiring for all of them, thus making a brand new powerhouse in the British business scene, both magical and mundane.

14- The 'scandalous' update and modernization to the code of conduct for all members of the Peverell Alliance included pay scales for the diverse positions and jobs. It had new and very specifically worded, strict language forbidding discrimination or violence towards ANY employees based on their species and circumstances of birth, including house-elves.

15- The very concepts of Pureblood, Half-Blood, First-Blood, New-Blood, Mud-Blood and Squibs were now declared to be biological, psychological, religious and sociological falsehoods used to keep racist liars and fraudsters in place over others. These words and their underlying philosophies of dominance and servitude were barred from any governance or contracts that the Houses of Peverell, Black and Potter would commit, and so were bound the junior Houses of the Alliance.

16- The Oath of Fealty to the British Crown & Throne, in the person of the seated monarch, with a subjunct oath to subordinate all personal desires, philosophies, professional guilds or religious sects to the will of Britannia domestically, and abroad while traveling for business or tourism.

17- The establishment of new contracts & codiciles with Gringotts National Goblin Bank of England, including vigorous negotiating of new rates and extended services commensurate to the elevation that many had received in the meeting.

18- End of meeting, with invitations to a late dinner at 20:00pm in the Black Manor, in London.

The schedule was harrowing for everybody, but all the items were necessities that their House magicks, the Gringotts contracts or the new British laws demanded be processed in the shortest delays possible. The moment that all members had read the schedule and agreed, Kreacher had signaled the goblin senior account managers of each House or Family to enter so that the requisite notarial witnessing & sealing of documents could be done in proper order. It would also speed-up the transmission and processing at the new departmental divisions being set up in the English government, or as soon as the new entities were available to treat the folios.

{ HP } --- { A first feel of a working family system } --- { HP }

It had been a mind-boggling day for everybody involved. The adults had soon gotten over their wounded pride and misgivings when the kids had gotten started on plowing through the mess with a vigor that only those not yet rendered skeptical or jaded by the system could wield.

The preliminary oaths and treaties between Families and Houses were testy subjects, but they all saw the necessity of why and how the people were arrayed around Harry due to decisions his ancestors had done. His great-grand-mother was a Bones, his grand-mother was a Black, his god-father had been a Black, his god-mother was a Longbottom, and there had already been a Line Continuation discussion in progress between James Potter and Susan's parents before they all died during the Welsh Blood Purity War of 1975-81, as the Britannic Crown named the era.

The goblins excused themselves for the noon meal, returning to their own offices for the duration until the actual business started up again. The small lunch break had allowed the adults to get to know Harry on a more personal level, without the constraints of protocol and laws chaining them. They asked a few questions to clear up some interrogations about where he lived, how well was he taking care of himself, what magicks had he learned on his own, and so forth. Just basic familial nosiness in a social gathering, as had been expected by all present.

Even Harry asked some things from the adults, mostly about how it was that nobody had ever thought to separate the diverse positions in the Welsh Wiccan Ministry to avoid a parasite from taking over the whole congregation. After a short explanation of the cultural and historic reasons why everything was concentrated so much, the child mostly wondered about diverse types of magicks and rituals he had become aware of, but never saw in practice, not even in the renewed curriculum of Hogwarts.

All the adults were surprised by how friendly Draco Malfoy was acting towards Hermione or Neville, since his early childhood and Pureblood-style education had not been conducive to being respectful towards his 'social inferiors'. It so happened that Hermione was a superlative potions brewer and alchemist, meshing quite nicely with Draco's own chosen professional aims, thus making them natural allies. This also made Neville and Harry, as purveyors of plants and animals, natural allies too, if on a different, less intellectual plateau. This didn't bother the boys as they had great fun with Susan and Nymmy, sometimes forcibly dragging the two potions addicts back into the fray with well timed comments, just to get a reaction out of them.

It was becoming very obvious for the parents that the study group and physical exercise routine their kids had set up for themselves at school had served far greater purposes than just netting them good grades and plaudits from the teachers. They had been forging a durable alliance that would far outlive their school careers, stabilizing their business relationships in the future. Even the small deals of bartering herbs or animal parts for finished potions, spell-scrolls or tutoring at home in some magicks specific to one person were amusing to witness. The kids had certainly taken the lessons from the goblins at heart, given how ruthless they were with each other over the smallest items and details, just for the fun of haggling and tetching it seemed.

The goblins returned at the appointed time to process through the much more paperwork intense segment of the meeting. All the bylaw renewals, changes and additions were not kids' play, even the adults having migraines from how much stuff was being processed in one sitting. Normally, the Lord of a House would handle the change-over of bylaws across multiple meetings, and cover only one Familial Lineage at a time. Harry Potter had managed to make them tackle all the Families and Houses in parallel, at the same time, in a single meeting. A judicious usage of pre-printed templates and forms that you fill-in just a few words here or there helped things along enormously for everybody, even the goblins.

The poor adults, whom had almost no contact with muggle life, nearly had a conniption when Hermione pulled out a portable computer with a refined Ember device that made the electricity needed while also serving as antenna to connect with the first free-wave Internet hubs in London. She had gotten the items from an international catalog offering modern business devices built in Japan by IBM's hybrid technomagical factory. The girl was the proud owner of a Windows CPU, equipped with a document scanner, and a large dot-matrix printer that could emboss or engrave all sorts of scriptworkes just as well as print regular texts and images. The output was only black ink, but the company had publicized a new four color model of their printer coming in 1995.

Harry and Draco promptly teased the girl for becoming the living incarnation of the stereotypical librarian -slash- secretary with her computer system, plastic document holder and folding reading lamp all set up as if she were in her home office. Her amused answer about doing it that way because boys were far too lazy to it right anyways got several huffs of laughter from her friends, just as Neville began to ask if she could scan a plant part to make a visual record for his greenhouses. The next half hour devolved into a mini sales pitch for the impressive machine as all five other young people decided that it was a good enough, and efficient enough, system to be worth implementing it as their working standard to harmonize the business comms between them and their Houses.

The goblin managers seemed amused, but were in fact paying close attention to the development, since anything that important clients deemed efficient or profitable for their families could be so for Gringotts as well. Plus, the queen had mandated that all partner nations held inside the Realms, colonies and Commonwealth of Britain, to standardize and harmonize their laws, rules & methods. This just might be the beginnings of a solution acceptable by all involved, especially since it was already muggle compatible and didn't depend on magical capacity or species-born aptitudes to work well.

The rest of the meeting was long, drab and boring, even for the two Tonks who were attorneys, despite that it was essentially their day jobs to do this sort of thing. Being experts at the task did not in any ways make it less dull or miserably mind-numbing to do. Thankfully, by the time that 19:00pm came around, all that was left were the revisions and signatures. The group had managed to successfully push through a marathon session and change over everything that they needed changed, well ahead of any other Family or House in England's Dominion. This would insure their good standing with the queen, the House of Lords and parliament in Westminster, leaving many of the other Families running around like headless chickens.

Harry then struck a golden bargain with Gringotts when he negotiated with them a royalty fee for using today's work drafts and forms templates to speed-up their other clients' conversions to the new legal and political climate. The money would be put into the new Peverell Consolidated Fund from which each House member of the Alliance would get dividends at the end of each year, according to how business went. It was a very happy congress of toothy smiles that agreed wholeheartedly to the boy's proposal, even if they griped that he was extorting them gleefully by charging them 15 Galleons as the starting price for the most basic kit, going up to 250 Galleons for the full multi-House Alliance system. The goblins happily admitted they would no doubt charge between 75 and 750 Galleons for the products, but that was just good management to make certain they had enough wiggle room to offer an occasional rebate while still getting enough to live on. They did admit that foreign clients would pay more, due to border taxes and the fact that Gringotts had treaties with other banks to sell a bit higher than the equivalent local product to not start a jurisdictional sales war.

Amazed at the boy's sheer genius and gumption, the adults followed his example of thanking the goblin managers for their time and the profits they would share in the future before leaving the room for the outgoing portkey platform in the lobby. After the goblin sentries had scanned the area to insure no trackers or spies were found, Harry went first with his Lord's ring, then the group used the portkeys enchanted by the goblins into their newly received Peverell Alliance crest rings to commit their first arrival at Black Manor, in #12 Grimmauld Place.

{ HP } --- { Dinner for friends and new acquaintances } --- { HP }

Narcissa and Andromeda were strongly affected by their arrival inside the house where they had spent so much of their childhood. Already in those days, the house had suffered a slow decay that nobody had known how to stop or invert. The current status of the house had completely erased all those decades of neglect, showing instead a lush, prestigious and pampered décor that told clearly of the wealth held by House Black in society.

Just the setting in the reception room surrounding the Floo and portkey landing zone was to die for, showing opulence but in a subtle and restrained fashion that had been the norm of good taste and deportment back in the mid 1800's, when such things mattered for more than just the Titled elites or monarchs. Dark mahogany furniture with yellow brass fixtures enhanced the pale gray of the masonry hearth, while dark purple drapes covering the windows balanced out the forest green paint on the plastered walls.

The two women blinked away sudden tears of melancholy as they saw Harry and Kreacher by the room's entry, discussing the cocktails to serve in the den, before dinner was served. The solicitous look in the elf's weathered face reminded them of how he used to gaze at aunt Walburga, in her saner periods. The second elf, a female wearing a classic matron maid's uniform received her instructions for the meal service with aplomb, nodding vigorously but not in the slightly manic way that other elves exhibited. Both seemed to have integrated a good portion of the boy's self control and desire for peace quite strongly to alter their attitudes so much.

A young human male entered the reception area, dressed in the usual clean trousers, button shirt and waistcoat of butlers, bowing formally towards Hermione as he relieved her of the traveling coat and small handbag she had gone to Gringotts with. Then the young man assisted each of the guests in removing their extra layers of travel garments similarly, except for Neville and Draco to whom he jested that "There's a pair of strapping young lads, you can go put this in the closet in the foyer. Thanks, mates!" as he dumped the accumulated coats and purses without warning.

Snorting in amusement, Hermione, Susan and Nymphadora passed by the stunned boys with big smirks on their faces as Harry helpfully pointed a finger towards the foyer (well, duh!) but made no other gesture to help his male friends further. Since the valet had already retreated to the kitchen to help finish the preparations, any appeals from the two boys were for naught.

Vaguely entertained by the antics of the children (maybe?) the adults were ushered by Harry himself towards the sumptuous den where the Master's Bar had been unlocked to supply the guests with luxury beverages for the half-hour of cocktails. The boy had a wide smirk as he told the two fathers that it should take the ladies at least that long to finish taking turns in the powder room to freshen from the long day of parleys and signing parchments. Huffing in amusement by their side, Amelia Bones actually agreed with him, making a vague gesture towards Andromeda and Narcissa who seemed to be lost in their memories as they were heading towards the floor's public bathroom for just that.

The first group of guests had just located themselves at ease in the plush, thickly upholstered sofas, divans and couches of the den when Kreacher appeared with a small wooden ventral couch and Rehz Ib Fettach already lounging upon the cushioned surface. The dragonnet looked at the guests anew, his purple irises scanning deeply into the beings to insure they were all the same as during the day, and had not developed into active threats since he last saw them. Setting the Drake near to Harry's favorite wingback chair, the elderly elf assumed station besides the bar, ready to serve as required. As per custom in the High Traditions, the Lord of the Manor ordered first, to prove to everybody that the drinks were safe to drink, as no traitors could breach the walls of the formidable domain.

"Kreacher; I will have a small, plain, halfling sherry from the 1768 Raggvurst, if you please."

The elf executed the task promptly, pouring the half ounce of rubescent liquid into a fine crystal stemglass for his master. Harry accepted the glass with soft-spoken thanks that carried weight in the House as it showed the guests how to address the staff and pass orders correctly. It also showed them that the child would insist quite firmly on the politeness and proper respect towards his hired employees, just as had been put into House Law this afternoon.

Taking a small sip of his wine, Harry sighed in contentment, nodding his approval as he snuggled deeper into his chair, letting his right hand drop onto Rehz to gently massage the thin, sensitive butterfly's wings on his back. Hissing in pleasure, the Faerie Drake ordered a half goblet of dwarven ale from a 1599 Merengen four-gallon wooden bar keg placed well in evidence in the hutch of the Master's bar. Lucious remembered well that particular ale, and just how difficult it was to import Danish dwarven foods over the last two centuries. Having that keg on display was a sign of great wealth, but actually drinking from it was a public statement of power. At some nine thousand Galleons, replacing the keg wouldn't be that much of an expense for the Black finances, but the headaches caused by the import license could, unless that had changed for much better and simpler as the queen promised to do.

The three adults each asked for the sort of drink they normally had for public affairs, not going out of their way to taste the more exclusive things, but not shying away from the offerings either, as they would not be displayed if Harry didn't want to share them. Lucius went for a classic British cocktail from the early 1900's while Theodore asked for a small, plain, Napoleon brandy, which matched well with Amelia's choice of a single malt Scotch whiskey on rocks. Noise from the door announced the return of the Black sisters, who again stood stunned in melancholy at the sight offered by the room and its occupants. Girding her courage, Andy ordered a mint cream with ice and mint leaves while Cissy opted for a much more wizardly gilly water on ice.

The two mothers had just situated themselves by their spouses that the group of children filed into the room, divested of travel clothes and much more at ease than during the day. Neville was waxing eloquently about the incredible hospitality that Harry had offered him after his rescue from the Croakers and Augusta, weeks ago. The injured boy had been offered a permanent room in Black Manor so as to not be alone in the cavernous meanders of Longbottom Manor, which would not go to waste as the elves would care for the place lovingly. Also, Neville would visit several times per week to maintain his greenhouses and harvest those parts that were ready to be processed for sale. At the same time, he would show Harry all those things the green eyed boy didn't get about managing plant-life, while Harry would educate Neville about livestock and butchery for potions or food parts. A good trade for all, as it seemed, and it worked well to date.

Susan just couldn't leave well enough alone, not since she was now officially sister to the pair of them. "Egads! Two young, eligible bachelor, and well titled lords, running around a pair of empty old manors without supervision! What ever manner of debauchery will they commit?"

The adults had no time to even digest the girl's rather riské overture that Neville replied gamely with a big smile "If there's any debauchery going on around me, tell me somebody! My head is still spinning so much from the ascension and bankers running roughshod over me that I don't think I could recognize it if it danced on the table in front of me. Though, I would give it a good try, just to change my mind off things for a few hours."

Draco snorted in his high quality elvish blueberry wine as he commented in a stage whisper "Just give Harry a chance to pull out his nargileh and you'll feel mellow enough. Especially since I know you two have been swapping herbs behind our backs, for which Hermione and I will have words with you about."

A collective huff of mirth passed through the children as the adults wondered if they were being facetious or honest about smoking deleterious herbs so often as to have developed habits and customs for the process.

x----------x

The late dinner was held in the formal dining room on the ground floor. The meal served by Jippsy was worthy of any five star restaurant found in Diagon District or elsewhere outside the limited Welsh Wiccan territory. The warm pea soup was followed by a small baguettine covered in garlic butter, sliced vegetables and melted cheese. The main dish was composed of three large ducks roasted over a live flame all day, with oven baked potatoes, mixed steamed vegetables and rice cooked with three types of onions and vinegar to make a tangy side dish. The desserts were splendidly assembled individual tartlets with a caramel base, fruit jam middle and meringue top with a drizzle of chocolate coulis.

The two elves and human staffer stayed visible during the meal, working together to make certain all the 'guests' of the House were served promptly. This small difference from the usual Pureblood manner of having all helpers or staff invisible unless ordered to appear caused a short bit of coolness between Harry and his guests, but it soon resolved. Mostly because Susan growled at her aunt before she could ask why Hermione's secretary/valet was helping in a House other than his own, especially with two house-elves present. It was however a question that Amelia would keep in the back of her mind for later, back at home, but she would get the answer since she felt it was vital to understand that bit of protocol Harry was putting in place.

The actual conversation and socialization was kept to very simple things, and never touched on the happenings of the day. Everybody had their fill of laws, protocols, forms and bankers with overlarge, toothy grins that made you hallucinate hungry dragons. The people had done their part and now wanted a slow, hearty meal without the headaches of politics and back-room dealings tonight. As such, the subjects spoken were mostly the adults who asked Nymphadora how she felt Hogwarts had progressed between her first six years and the last she attended. The young woman tried to explain as best she could, often asking Hermione or Harry to step in to elaborate the logic or usefulness of certain teaching methods or curriculum points, especially in light of what the queen had ordered be changed in their society.

It was a few minutes passed midnight that the guests started to beg off, wanting to reach their beds before one in the morning, as it was still a work day on the morrow. Although, all admitted that they were working from home since there was no Welsh Ministry anymore, most shops and boutiques were closed, and the Family affairs could be handled through Gringotts via mirror or Floo as needed. Still, appearances must be kept, and the queen had demonstrated she would not hesitate to summon any of the Titled nobles or Heads of Families to her side if she wanted their service that day. Better be ready, just in case.

The last farewells given, Harry, Rehz and Neville finally had the house to themselves again, with the two very happy house-elves who had been complimented by their master's guests at the end of the meal, before digestives were passed around. Hermione had thanked Harry for letting Roland serve during the meal so as to get some experience at staffing meetings at that level of society, to be able to do so in her manor eventually. The young boy had waved off the thanks, seeing it as just a small bit of helping each other out between fast friends, not something worthy of formal recognition like this. Besides, Harry also didn't want to admit that he was a bit weary around humans, especially the older, larger men, so having Roland moving around him during the evening had helped him to adjust a bit more to close contacts.

Neither of the people involved in the serious, politically charged discussions were aware of the damaging consequences their Alliance and contracts would have in the coming weeks, but several had gotten the information before they sat for dinner, and plans were afoot.

Summer vacations 1992; A third helping of Dobby

(Frederic Chopin – Funeral march)

August 1992  
Multiple locations  
The Britannic Realms, colonies and Commonwealth

Harry Potter was frowning with the seriousness and concentration that no 12 year old should exhibit. Then again, he was trying to hit a moving target with the rebuilt 9mm pistol he had stolen from his uncle Vernon. He was finally big enough around the hands and forearms to handle the weapon without running the risk of the recoil breaking something in his limbs.

His god-brother Neville was standing a few feet to the side and rear, behind a thin stone wall that was engraved with projectile deflection glyphs and velocity reduction fields. The second boy had been in a foul, depressive mood when he learned that his grand-mother had willingly sacrificed her son, daughter-in-law and grand-son for a mad quest for Power that led nowhere. Neville's parents were now awake and aware, but confined to life-support beds next to professor Snape in the Janus Thickey ward for long-term spell damages. He still had not been allowed to meet them since they were roused from their artificial insanity, and it was weighing on him.

Harry had taken a chance by showing the boy the stone-thrower crossbow he had made in the summer camp a while back and, upon seeing his enthusiasm, had taken out several of the smaller pistols he owned. Neville had been both impressed and scared, but still curious and willing to go through with trying out shooting at stuff. The first time he had held a live pistol in his hands had been like a switch inside his head was flipped back to where it should have been. There, in his hands, was a device that no runes, potions or mind-rape could ever take from him. If a weapon made by muggles was so powerful and reliable that millions used it each day, then a part-squib like himself could certainly rely on its strength against those bastards that wanted to destroy him.

Neville had enjoyed the woodsy feel of the crossbow, but he just loved the odor of burning black powder in flintlock pistols or rifles, and found his true match with cordite the first time he smelled it in Harry's shooting gallery, inside the trunk's warehouse. The pudgy blond boy always preferred break-action weapons like shotguns or Derringer pistols, but enjoyed revolvers too. He learned how to operate a magazine-fed pistol out of curiosity and practicality as Harry pushed him to, but he truly preferred the more manual weapons.

The two boys were presently enjoying a friendly shooting competition in the trunk, trying to see who could put the more bullets in the center mass of the animated wooden dummies when Harry sensed a pressing request for an urgent meeting from Dobby coming through. Given the fear and loathing that emanated from the bond with the Blood-Law-Elf, Harry decided right there to inform Neville that they would be going into the Black Manor for an emergency, for which discretion and Peverell secrecy oaths would be in effect.

{ HP } --- { To sacrifice a generation for folly's sake } --- { HP }

The two human boys jogged through the large house and down the stairs to the first floor den where Harry had mentally asked Dobby and his own elves to meet them. They arrived in time to see Jippsy put down a serving tray with six of everything, including imported elvish tea, scones. Jams and condiments. Neville looked at the apparently ailing, mistreated elf with worry, having come to understand fully why Harry preferred interactions with any species other than humans since he had been accepted into the Black Manor. The way he shamelessly spoiled Rehz was only surpassed by how generous and attentive to his own elves he was, something that Neville had begun emulating whenever he returned to Longbottom Manor or his subjunct properties.

Harry sat in his usual wingback chair with Rehz on his ventral couch in hand's reach, Neville took the other wingback chair, while the three elves sat side-by-side on the large couch. Once in place, Dobby explained what had been so urgent that he had to meet with Harry in the middle of the day, when he should be in Wiltshire to serve the Malfoys.

Things had changed dramatically.

A small group of young Welsh wizards, aged between 17 and 25 years old, had gathered at Malfoy Manor in the hopes of obtaining the help of Lucius Malfoy to break the hold of the muggle queen over their sect. They remembered how Lucius had been on the conservative, noble Houses' side of debates since he joined the Wizengamot, barely eight years ago when his father Abraxas had died from acute Dragon Pox. They also knew that he had supported Voldemort with money, contacts and votes in the Gamot, especially for putting Cornelius Fudge in place. They thought they had a solid ally in the man, despite his public satisfaction with the demise of the Dark Lord, and his oath-bound fealty to the new Lord Black.

These eleven young men had managed to obtain audience directly at Malfoy Manor due to having a letter of introduction from the group's silent mastermind; Unspeakable Bode. The felon who had escaped the Wizengamot Hall on the Samhain 1991 when Fudge and Crouch were removed had lain in wait, silently mounting support and resources in the hopes of creating the perfect conditions for his trap to work.

Bode was a fanatical Pureblood bigot, a specist, a sexist and also an ageist of the worse sort. There wasn't a social group other than old, white, Welsh Wiccan wizards that he didn't hate with multiple passions, all of them based on peasant superstitions or his own twisted desires for Power Penultimate. Bode's basic drive was simple; he wanted to crush, subjugate and enslave all muggles as slaves to be split between the wizarding titled Families, noble Houses or public institutions like the Ministry and schools for magicals. Of the magicals, he believed only humans had the intellect, civility and Divine Blessings to have a genuine Right-of-Rule on Earth. All species like the goblins would be exterminated or reduced to chattel, being far lower than human slaves or even livestock on farms. These would be available for purchasing by anybody on the open market like any ordinary pet or working mule, and could then be killed or sold off as such.

But, the traitor Unspeakable saw a clear obstacle on his path towards fomenting the fall of muggles and the reorganization of Magical Britain into his twisted distopia; Harry Potter.

Firstly, he didn't believe that Harry had ever been a horcrux, but he was willing to lie about this to convince the population the child had to die for there to be peace on Earth anew.

Secondly, Bode had an absolute disgust for Harry because of his half-blood birth and the way he had learned more from his mud-blood mother than his paternal family's 'Blood Compact', grimoire and animated portraits. Or, at least, that was the spiel he used to recruit these young fops who visited Lucius. Nobody knows just how much Bode really knew about Harry's life away from the public eye and the court documents in the case against Dumbledore.

Thirdly, Harry had accumulated 3 titled Families and noble Houses in his hands before he was eleven years old, something that had Bode's hubris and jealousy running on fourth speed all day long as he was frothing at the mouth with envious rage. One of his most often repeated rants was that children should NEVER inherit anything more than mere money, and nothing more than a small allowance, tightly regulated by their betters in Magic and Society. He preached that no child should ever inherit before they were passed 35 years old, and never if an older male relative up to the fifth degree of distance up, laterally or down the Family Tree, was alive and mentally healthy to take up the Title, Rank, Style and Position at stake. He also said that his new order would never allow one person to hold multiple Peerage Titles or House Lordships, this being insured by new inheritance laws, and even a Wizarding Reproduction Act he was drafting.

All in all, Bode wanted Harry dead for many reasons, some more political and economical than others, but there were still some pretty personal ones in there. Harry had been among the group that had brought down Dumbledore's Perfect Wizarding Britain, challenged and destroyed Cornelius Fudge's Apathetic Ministry, and also destroyed the Croaker Brothers who were trying to put in place a society where old white male wizards could rule unimpeached without having any laws or consequences to worry about.

Like a child whining that mommy had punished him for eating sweets before supper, he idolized a male-centered world where women were silent slaves in the home while men were men in a manly way and boys were their toys to exploit. In his diseased, twisted view of things, the criminal didn't even realize just how infantile he was being, no matter how much he said he wanted old and mature men of experience to rule Britain.

In any case, the former Ministry employee had concocted a foul plan that was set to trigger on the first Friday of the school year, when the children would all be inside Hogwarts.

Bode had used alchemically enhanced clay to fashion a life-sized statue of a gigantic basilisk, even going so far as to craft lethal eyes out of refined Ember alloy. Soon, he would complete a Dark ritual to sacrifice a number of mud-blood souls to Habberath, god of mutations, aberrations and horrors, to transform the raw, still unbaked clay into living flesh. This would produce a golem that was around 95% similar to a real basilisk, including the cursed gaze that turned flesh to stone, but with the caveat that this beast would obey only Bode as its mind would be programmed from birth. The plan was to unleash the fake basilisk inside Hogwarts to hunt down and destroy any wizarding children that didn't fit Bode's definition of pure British wizarding males, and blame the only publicly avowed parselmouth in the Isles, one Harry Potter – Black – Peverell.

Bode planned to circulate a rumor that Harry had gone mad with Power from having too many titles and lordships all at once, and that having unfettered, unsupervised, access to the ancient volumes of the Black Family Library had caused a catastrophe in his childish mind. The story would say that the boy had been so desperate to find a family to belong to that he had tried some forbidden rituals of antiquity, to become more like the most powerful Black men of old. The only result being that the boy had accidentally integrated their legendary Black Insanity that struck one man and one woman of each generation.

Bode's plan was in itself simple; he wanted the credulous, gullible population who had just suffered major upheavals, losses, shame and déchéance to grab onto this one thing as a way to climb back out of their perceived hole of humiliation. The child would be blamed for a mess, the people would accept that he was guilty without any proof or trial as they often did, as they had all been trained to do this for centuries. So, the bleating sheep would promptly riot, trying to kill Harry or at least strip him of all Powers, titles and lordships, while he was in a mental hospital, getting the Unspeakable's special cure for everything: a good hard 'Obliviate'. The only thing that was complicated in the line of thought was the catastrophe necessary to trigger a mass panic big enough for the dickless masses to forego survival instincts long enough to challenge the muggle soldiers, and the few wizards the queen had on pay.

Harry was the only parselmouth of record active in England; and Blam!, catastrophe found.

Dobby explained that the young men had been categorical on this point: Harry must be at Hogwarts for the story to be credible as there never was a parselmouth who could control snakes remotely. The animal must be within the aura of the caster or the mancy doesn't take hold. So, Bode was stuck waiting for Harry to be confirmed present inside the school grounds to start his nefarious plot.

And of course, the sick, twisted bastard had used his mouth-pieces to offer Lucius a boon in exchange of being given a title, lordship and seat in the new Wizengamot that would be raised, after the mess was settled and cleaned to his convenience. If Lord Malfoy actively supported the story of Harry's guilt in the media and public assemblies, he would make sure that his golem never attacked Draco. It would in fact target specifically the friends and allies of Harry Potter until they were all dead and their Lines extinguished. The metamorphic whore, Nymphadora Tonks, would be killed by a discrete contractor that Bode knew, if Malfoy wanted to front the money for the job to be done without dirtying his own hands. If he really wanted to insure the Black title went to Draco, with him as Regent, then he knew what had to happen, lest the newly enacted Peverell Alliance documents become binding in full.

And yes, Bode had spies inside Gringotts and Buckingham Palace, so he was well aware of, and thoroughly disgusted by, the depraved piece of legal, political and familial tracasseries that had been wrought by Harry to secure his position over mature, experienced adults who should in fact be ruling over his body, magic and soul.

{ HP } --- { Dobby's first suggestion } --- { HP }

Harry sat in stunned silence.

There was no other reaction logical when confronted to the sheer insanities and perfidies that some people were willing to delve into to obtain power or vengeance.

Roderick Bode was well beyond insane, and it was showing.

Not only was the moron losing himself in his circular arguments, he was also putting together stuff that was completely contrary to each other, and then he blamed others for the illogical results of his madness.

As the muggles would say; "This dog is rabid, shoot it and burn the carcass before it spreads."

Exchanging a look with Neville, the other boy returned the glare at full force, declaring "We have an Alliance in place specifically to deal with these messes. I think it's high time we brought them in. No offense, Harry, but we're a pair of 12 year old kids, not legendary monster hunters for the Grimm Fairie Tales. We need help, and even then I don't know how much of a chance at surviving we have."

Bouncing in his seat, Dobby raised a hand shyly, stage whispering "Dobby have idea to help master Harry stay alive." Immediately he was stared at intently by the two boys, almost scaring the poor elf into popping away. A few seconds passed as everybody calmed themselves, then the ancient elf explained "Bad nasty wizard plan depends on Harry Potter being present near fake serpent so he can make it look like you control it. Just don't go to school. If master Harry isn't near the castle grounds, then bad man can't trigger his monster puppet or everybody will know its not master Harry's fault."

Neville came back with a negative view of things. "I don't think it will be that easy. Bode was already a cracked pot, from what was found in his office and home during the investigations after his escape, last Halloween. He gives me the feel of a madman who'll activate the golem whether you're present or not, just because of the way he wants society to bow at his feet. Dumbledore, Voldemort, Algernon Croaker and Cornelius Fudge are all gone, but their procreates just keep on crawling out of the cesspit anyways. You abstaining from Hogwarts, or not walking out in public for that matter, isn't going to change that, or what calamities a terrorist will throw out at you."

The poor fearful elf Jippsy whispered as she wrung her hands in quivering terror "Will they bee's finding our home? Will wees bees safes in the Black Manor? Bad Croakers tried to find Master Harry, and almost did just last July. Could others find us? Surely this Bode traitor knew his boss had an eye on this block of houses... It couldn't have been that much of a secret, not inside the Department of Mysteries itself."

Harry replied in a low mumble "No, it wasn't that secret. The investigators who searched his office found papers relating to the fact he had tried to find my house for his own needs, without ever being part of the Croakers' personal vendetta. They didn't trust many, and even with Ember filaments in his head, Saul Croaker thought the man was too unstable to be given sensitive jobs."

Neville commented airily "Whelp, that's the Britain we live in today, folks! Even traitors and rebels have standards of sanity and stability for recruiting numskulls into their schemes. Does that make anybody feel better or worse? I can't really seem to make up my mind about this intriguing revelation into the minds of the depraved..."

Glaring sideways at his god-brother, Harry was trying desperately to wrap his mind around the entire, chaotic mess that had just dropped on his head. The only truth he could hang on to at this point was the first thing Neville had said; they were kids and it wasn't their job to handle this.

Closing his eyes in a vain hope to stave off a stress migraine, Harry ordered "Dobby, please inform Lord Malfoy that his entire Family, plus all house-elves and hirelings on the manor grounds, are required to attend the Lord Peverell under the Alliance's defense clauses. Then give the same message to Andromeda Tonks, please. Jippsy, you will go to Amelia Bones with a similar request, then go to Hermione and return once she is informed of the emergency meeting. Kreacher, you will escort Neville to Longbottom Manor so that he can recover all elves and any human hirelings he might have on other properties. Rehz and I will hold the fort here. All of you are to move about with weapons and spells ready, irrespective of any laws or customs that anybody may want to enforce on you. Go, get it done. I'll wait here as back-up, if you need me."

Neville came back first, which didn't surprise Harry in the least. The boy had been the first warned, had heard the whole sordid story, and knew first hand how important a quick reaction would be for his survival. The boy had four house-elves with him and put all of his properties under stasis, after he had triggered the auto-vaulting enchantments to pack & send everything to the safety of the Longbottom House vault under Gringotts. His other properties were all dependent on the elves from the Manor to do their tasks, so they had been easy to secure too.

The second person to arrive was Hermione with Roland and her sole elf. The manor had not been fully awakened from stasis yet, to give her time to visit the entire estate and decide what needed to be brought to activity. She was in limbo at present since there was no magical government to negotiate permits or licenses, or inspect work facilities to certify the potions and herbs she wanted to produce like her ancestor had. Furthermore, most professional guilds were now in abeyance or voided until the Crown decided what kind of system would fulfill that particular function. She arrived just a few minutes after Neville, all her few worldly possessions in tow after the manor underwent auto-vaulting and stasis.

Amelia and Susan Bones were third to arrive, with three elves and their bags, having been prepared for this sort of thing since the Welsh Blood Purity War of 1975. The Bones Manor had already been sparsely furnished due to the threat of terrorism for the last 15 years, so activating the auto-vaulting charms and stasis was a process nearly as quick as Hermione's estate.

The Tonks were fourth to arrive. They lived in a modest two-level home for the last twenty-five years that was much smaller and discrete than the huge manors of other noble families. They had no elves, using 'Unseen Servant' dweomers when needed. The moment Andromeda had gotten the message from Dobby, she had triggered the layered defenses on the home, sending all of their furnishings and belongings to Gringotts and putting the building to sleep while it was empty. She had copied the system of the aurors years ago, to make three specific pieces of jewelry that acted as pagers for her family, in case of attacks or natural crisis. That meant she had been able to quickly inform her husband and daughter of the threat without having to run after them all over England, so their preparations were just as fast.

The Malfoys were the last to arrive, due to the sheer incredulity that both Lucius and Narcissa suffered from when Dobby assembled the small family to give them the message. Draco, however, took over to push his parents into gear so that they could make the assembly on time. The second problem was the size and complexity of the Malfoy holdings compared to how the other Pureblood estates were managed. Lucius had read and learned from several of the best muggle economics professors on Earth, in the five different languages that he could speak, and one common theme had been diversification to spread risks across multiple properties. So he had built smaller but more numerous buildings for everything; workshops, boutiques, rental office spaces, and modest apartment blocks in regions not usually associated with Welsh Wiccan activity. He had six elves for the manor and a dozen for the other buildings, plus seven household human staffers for receiving mundanes directly at home or his dedicated office building. Once convinced of the gravity of the matter, getting everything ordered, packed and auto-vaulted then put in stasis, was no small feat, even with elves and automated enchantments.

There were now 19 humans, 28 elves, and one Stygian Faerie Drake, in the largest reception hall of Black Manor, and the place was still just half-full.

Harry invoked the Peverell Alliance oaths, spreading around the requisite fealty & secrecy contracts to be signed by each and every being present, without exception. A few of the Malfoy estate's human staffers were flabbergasted that this child could order their boss around, which got them a monumental stink-eye from all three Malfoys at once. Properly cowed, the employees signed the oaths and sat on the chairs, sofas or benches as were left available. Jippsy and Kreacher received permission to draft any elf necessary to insure ALL guests in the manor were safe, fed and comfortable for the duration of the emergency lock-down.

At this point, Harry cut his right thumb and smeared blood on the Black sigil ring, commanding the wards to rise to warfare status, powering to lethal strength on all layers that were outside the estate perimeter and outside the house's actual walls too. Any being in the two zones who wasn't oath-bound to the Peverell Alliance was to be treated as an enemy and killed on detection, questions to be asked from their soul when it was summoned later on.

Everybody in the room, even the lowest squib employee of the Malfoy estate, felt the ominous, ravenous aura of the Black Blood-Wards sweep over them and settle densely all over the estate, and even further out for the scanning and detection functions. One of the human hirelings and three of the elves needed to be given medical assistance when they experienced mental shock from being overwhelmed by the high percentage of raw negative energy diffused in the wards.

It took almost an hour just to get people back to health and order, before the meeting could start to spread the information and make decisions for their common survival.

{ HP } --- { No country for honest folk anymore } --- { HP }

Now that all the living people covered by the Peverell Alliance were assembled in one room, Harry began the meeting by having Kreacher bring the Black Family pensieve so that Lord Malfoy could show the meeting with the conspirators. The imperious gesture allowed Harry to bypass any questions of HOW he knew about the situation, or who had informed him, but the stunned look on the older man's face suggested clearly that this was not over. He would find out who or what had given the information and deal with it then. The process of playing the memory in full took about an hour, plus the obvious stops at a few points so that Amelia, Narcissa and the Tonks could get a better look at each person present and scribble notes on who said what.

The first thing that Andromeda noted was that all the terrorists were barely out of school, and a few were still in apprenticeships thusly not fully autonomous yet. All of them were related to one of the old men that had been executed by the crown in the last eight months. All of them were already well known for blood purity fanaticism, bigotry against muggle-born, and specist attitudes towards all non-humans. Three of the men had been suspected of rape, but the charges were dropped on account that the victims were from 'non-noble' houses compared to their own elevated station as part of the 'named houses' of the Wizengamot. Two of the men had been charged with murder in foreign countries, but Britain had refused to extradite them specifically because the victims were not humans, so the Ministry had considered the charges false and threatened to help the men sue the accusing countries for defamation of Pureblood Scions.

In other words, Roderick Bode had chosen a bunch of lack-wit lackeys who thought with their cocks rather than their heads. Young, bold, boisterous, cocksure, entitled, and lead by their dreams of being on top without any efforts other than having been born for it, like their ancestors had been. These fucktards were the very worse incarnation of what goes wrong with hereditary titles, positions or wealth, when the newer generations aren't raised right. Add to that the problems of having a wand to shake at the Universe, and it really seemed to their deluded eyes as if the world had been created to satiate their wants, like a giant toy store without a cashier.

In other words, trying to reason with these 'good wizarding boys' would be a waste of time.

None were interested in listening to anything that wasn't a justification for their crimes or an empowerment to keep on committing these depravities. Rabid dogs to shoot, yet again.

The group were suitably appalled by the crass, insane plan of Bode for the basilisk golem and killing as many young children as he could to make the population panic into a reflex gesture that wouldn't be forethought or analyzed at all. He wanted a series of massive riots that would blossom into full-on civil war, forcing the muggles to either fight with their best weapons early on, or else withdraw from the field to save magical lives, thus leaving Bode as the winner. In either case he would win since he would get to see the muggles' greatest assets revealed so he could plan counters, or he would lord over a deserted war-field that had been abandoned to his troops by the fleeing enemies. From a purely tactical point of view, he would win either way.

Except that Amelia noted two failure points in his plans;

Firstly - The muggle army would not respond well to terrorism, and the crown's response would be brutal in a way that Welsh Wiccan wizards had never experienced in person before. This would be a true war, with home-to-home searches, suspension of civil rights, curfews, arbitrary detentions, harsh interrogation, seizure of assets, lands and titles of the conspirators, etc... Then would come the public executions, or worse, squibbing and confinement in muggle prison.

Secondly – the terror plot had many moving parts that didn't mesh well together. Bode's golem was a self-contained system, completely independent of blood purity, Faith or Creed, that the madman could trigger anywhere at any time. His followers, on the other hand, were all bound to familial or contractual obligations, mentally limited by blood purism, and most didn't have the combat capacities needed to fight in a war against trained career soldiers with guns, artillery, motorized vehicles and satellites that scan the Earth without rest or failure. Plus, the key point of the plan – rioting crowds – was not in any ways a reliable system to cause a societal change since people in a riot were almost never aware of what was happening, or what the result would be in the end. Riots were chaos and destruction, not ordered transition and rebuilding for better, so absolutely nothing positive could come from this method to secure changes in Britain.

In reality, to Amelia's expert eye as a career agent in DMLE and the auror corps, what Bode really wanted was more somber, and far crasser, than he had told his conspirators. The traitor wanted to collapse all of Britannic society, in such a way that it took almost two centuries to rebuild from the fall. The goal was relatively simple too. He was a wanted fugitive, a seditious traitor who faced a cruel, slow execution if caught. Given how powerful magical Britannia truly was, especially since Elizabeth II had taken things in hand directly, the felon was in genuine fear for his life. The queen had put a generous bounty on his head, with a bigger amount if he was captured alive or at least his soul was intact for interrogation.

No; from Amelia's perspective and experience, Bode didn't really want to change the system or put in place a new Wizengamot with limited titles, severe inheritance rules and gerontocratic dominance. That was just spiel told to a few handfuls of fools to get them moving in the direction he wanted the authorities to go waste their time. The senior auror wasn't even sure that the golem attacking Hogwarts was real or would give the results Bode had said he wanted, for many of the titled and noble lords would panic at the threat to their Houses and retaliate most violently, joining the hunt for Bode's head. No, the golem plot stank of ruse and misdirection, as everything Roderick Bode had done throughout his career in the Unspeakables.

Hermione asked "But what if he does actually send that golem to Hogwarts? What then? The way the ward matrix is damaged, the castle has no automatic defenses to rely on, and the elves can only do so much as they are mortal too. Faced with a basilisk, the kids will panic and most teachers too, even if they were forewarned of the plot."

Theodore Tonks commented "Maybe Elizabeth II will negotiate for a contingent of minotaurs to guard the school, or something similar. Although, given the state of society and how Hogsmead was razed to the ground weeks ago, it might be better to send the kids to the lesser county schools for a few years. Maybe even until Hogwarts is completely re-warded, and Hogsmead rebuilt with new houses, shops, and a more diverse population basin. A Gringotts bank, auror station and medical clinic wouldn't be a bad start to planning the new village layout."

Neville asked a very intelligent question; "Excuse my bluntness, but nobody ever told me what exactly Bode was specializing in, at the Department of Mysteries. Was he just a generalist field agent or a research assistant? It could help us to figure out what he's really planning."

Amelia Bones called a folio from her auror department's dimensional trunk where she had copies of all the Ministry's judicial archives, a precaution she took just before the queen dissolved the Gamot and closed the building for revision. Leafing through the sheets, she found Bode's projects and assigned jobs, with a startle. Looking over the group, she said "We may be in worse shape than I thought. Bode was a research specialist assigned to study the 'Patronus' charm and its runic equivalent. He was part of the Unspeakables in charge of maintaining the wards of Azkaban prison, specifically the pillars and medallions that repel the dementors from protected zones like the kitchens, barracks and warden's office. He was also one of a handful of humans alive who could understand the Dementors and speak to them without a translation device. That meant that he was also, by rebound, the Department's expert-on-record on the physiology and psychology of Dementors. Fuck! He was the Unspeakable in charge of selecting which dementor administered the kiss to those condemned to death by the Gamot in tribunal sessions, and bringing the creature to the execution room and back out afterwards."

Lucius swore viciously as he ran both hands through his meticulously coiffed blond hair, not caring that he was making it a mess. "He's going after Azkaban! He wants to make a deal with the dementors, or just set them loose on the whole nation! What a... demented... idiot he is..."

Hermione whispered softly "No, he's not. It's actually frightening how calculated and logical it all is. The country put a price on his head internally, but also internationally, while locking down the borders both muggle and magical. He's like a fish in a wooden barrel that's floating in the middle of a deep pool filled with piranhas. Either he gets grabbed from the barrel, or he jumps out to get eaten alive by the predators. He's stuck and needs a way out."

Frowning, the girl concentrated on externalizing her thought pattern; "Breaking what's left of Hogwarts will essentially break the Welsh Wiccan sect irrevocably, and I think that he needs that to happen to become free of any remaining oaths that still bind him to England or the crown. Those vestigial oaths might be the only things keeping him in the country, instead of hiding in Argentina with the White Council's morons. Secondly, if there is a basilisk attack anywhere, the few magical defenders of the realm will all concentrate on it for the fight, leaving gaping holes in the territorial surveillance & protection. Add several days or weeks of riots and civil uprisings, and you have to pull your border guards in to beef-up your foot patrols and riot suppression squads, making holes in the net that's keeping Bode inside England."

Amelia finished for her: "And if you add loose dementors to the mix, then the entire country, from shore to shore, will become an out-of-control cauldron that's exploding repeatedly until somebody finds a way to put out the fire. Or worse, they empty the pot to reduce the reaction back to a manageable level."

Worried sick, one of the Malfoy employees asked fearfully "A country's not a kettle of soup, and people aren't chopped vegetables! How could they 'reduce' the reaction like that?"

Harry replied blithely "The same way that monarchs, churches and civil governments have done for millenia uncounted; when the popular reaction to high taxes or constant wars becomes too harsh. They REMOVE from the reaction those bits & pieces that make it happen or sustain the chaotic boiling. A potion master would use tongs or a sieve-ladle to take out excess materials, but a country would imprison, banish or kill the revolutionary people until the civilian uprisings were ended by attritioning the violent sub-groups into non-existence. You can't have a rebellion if there are no persons to cry foul, or protest, or march in arms in the streets. And for millenia, the best solution to civil war has been to kill-off the opposing factions until only the group with the biggest number of people, buildings, machines and lands stood on top as government."

Andromeda Tonks nodded in agreement, saying "I do believe that queen Elizabeth II is at the end of her patience with the magical side of her Realms, and specifically with the racial and religious sects that have rotted away at the moral integrity and loyalty of her nation. We may in fact be on the verge of a new Inquisition, or modern Witch Hunt, to bring down these traitors at last."

Draco grumbled "Unless the queen plans to have every witch and wizard of every sect take truth serum and swear an oath of fealty to her crown, she'll be having problems. The question is, has she seen the solution, and does she have the means to implement it? The Families in the Peverell Alliance have already given their blood-bond to her, but will she realize the Power it gives her, and will she be capable of seizing it as a template to improve the country?"

Before anyone could say anything further, a loud discordant noise emanated from the auror badge Amelia still kept inside her robes, soon followed by similar sounds from the Wizengamot badges that Harry, Neville, Hermione and Lucius had received as seated Warlocks.

Looking at the small dull black pearl that had stopped glowing and now had a crack in it, each of them thought the same thing together; Azkaban had fallen. They were too late. Probably that Bode had spies that warned him of the sudden influx of magic from certain areas of the country, plus the goblins would have been a-twitter with worries about all the Titled Houses that suddenly engaged their auto-vaulting charms and immediately raised siege wards on their estates. The foul traitor had realized that his foils and cat's paws had been discovered, so he went straight for the big prize.

Azkaban's ward system was disabled, and the dementors were now free of all control.

Not knowing how resistant to those foul things his house was, Harry ordered Kreacher "Drop the physical shutters on all doors, windows, chimneys and outflow pipes to the sewers. Make certain the barricade doors on all floors are unlimbered and ready to close tightly, in case the house is penetrated by enemies. And open the third basement for me. We need to go prime the self-destruct cauldron, just in case the very worse happens and we can't keep them out. They won't take our souls, and Bode won't get us to play with, not if I can stop it from happening."

{ HP } --- { Dobby's second suggestion } --- { HP }

Surprising the adults, the unkempt house-elf Dobby, who had arrived with the Malfoys, walked forward to address Harry Potter directly, without being asked beforehand.

Wringing his hands a bit in nervousness, Dobby offered "If Master Harry Peverell bees looking for a way to keeps his families safes, then maybees Dobby knows a way."

Raising an imperious index finger to keep quiet everybody in the room, the twelve year old then gestured with the same finger for the elf to speak his mind without fear, sending him psychically a wave of affection, support and trust. Smiling just a bit, the elf nodded, speaking louder to be heard over the many small noises that occurred with such a large gathering.

"Dobby remembers a time, long ago before the Isles became England, and that became an Empire all around the Earth. Back then, there were no governments, no churches to the Living Gods, and not even any Clanholds, the ancestors of the Chartered Families. No, back then people gathered around one of two things; a Boss-man of strength or mind, or a precious resource that would help keep them all alive, warm and fed."

Dobby sat on the floor near where Rehz Ib Fettach lounged on his ventral couch, gazing into the deep purple eyes of the Fae creature as if they were crystal balls from which he could better see those events of long ago.

"The founders of the Family Peverell, that became the clan, and then the Chartered House, were in the original times very good, decent people. They were also from another plane of existence, despite that they were humans just like Earth already had. They had come from the Styx River demi-plane, arriving in primitive, slow, sail boats that needed oars half the time to fight the currents of the unpredictable fluvial basin. Their boats were about fifty feet long by a dozen wide, open topped with just barely two feet deep of cargo hold. The single mast had a triangular sail that one man alone could trim or furl, while a second man held the tiller at the stern. These were simple riverine fishing boats that had been strengthened physically and magically for the long journey they had been given by Hades, God of Death, Patron Guide of the Peverell since long before they arrived here."

Dobby sighed deeply, thinking back to those simple, if primitive, times of his early life. Things had been bad when the Originator had held his first bond since birth, but then living and serving had gotten better when the new neighbors had come to trade, buying Dobby in exchange for their exotic, foreign crafts.

"The founders of the Peverell were already middle-aged when they left their birth village, following a Revelation given them by Hades. They had five children, three sons and two daughters by birth from their marriage. In time, they also adopted a niece whose parents died from a monster's claws during the trip towards Earth. The legends only remember the three sons and their relics, but the parents and three girls were just as real and important."

Looking around at the people assembled, Dobby explained the long genealogy;

"The adults who got the holy vision were Hanterak Peverell, the father and master necromancer, and Solace Kinsaver, the mother and priestess holy healer. Both worshiped Hades and Gaia equally but revered Hades as the patron of the family. Their children were Antioch Peverell (son), necromancer; Allegria Peverell (daughter), mistress apothecary; Cadmus Peverell (son), necromancer; Solemnity Peverell (daughter), mistress herbologist; Ignotus (son), necromancer; and Felicity Kinsaver (adopted niece), mistress biomancer. All of the young folks were in their early twenties when the Pilgrimage towards Earth began. As was the custom back then, each of the younger ones had married by age 21, just after passing 'Magisterium Ascendo', the final magical maturation of the core and mind. There were fourteen boats that left the Old Place, to navigate the chaotic flows and violent shorelines of the Styx. Only five badly overcrowded boats made it to destination."

Dobby looked down to his damaged, disease-stained fingers in contemplation as he tried to view events from so many centuries ago. His second human master, Ignotus Peverell, had given him copies of his memories of the fateful trip through monster infested worlds and twisted realities that were the daily lot of those who sail the Stygian flows. If only he could remember correctly...

"When the Peverell arrived, they didn't enter the Prime Material Plane or the Earth-sphere right away, preferring to build a base camp from which to explore the neighboring regions in the Styx, Border Ethereal and Neverland. Once assured that things were viable despite the multiple beasts and monsters, they fortified their camp into something permanent to begin the cornerstone of their Family's wealth and safety. They built and enchanted a Stygian Gate to link the demi-plane and Prime Material Plane with a fixed tunnel that served also as a vestibule between them. The first arrival gateway was at the very northern tip of what became known as the Isle of Man, and they created an explorer's camp on the seashore, just in sight of the gate's arch. The pillars were tall and broad enough for one of their boats to pass through without taking down the sail or lowering the mast, to simplify transit from the Styx to Earth."

"Once the primary work link was done, they spent many months on exploring and prospecting for a suitable site to install the new clanhold. Guided by Hades, they found their spot in Albion, on the main Isle of Britannia, right on the line where one day England and Scotland would be separated. They chose a place that was lined on the south by the river Esk, on the west by Kirtle Water, on the east by Sark River, with no real geographic limit to the north. It gave them a good, spacious land to begin the vast project that their Family had been planning for decades already, since the parents of Hanterak and Solace were wee babes in nappies. There, in the heart of Albion, they set about the construction of their greatest communal work; 'Gretna's Blessed Green Glens', named after the matriarch who had founded the Kinsaver lineage of apothecaries and healers, an epoch before then. Today, that spot is called 'Gretna Green' by muggles and wizards alike, but nobody remembers why, not even in the best, oldest history books."

Waving his hands in the air, Dobby made a yellow outline map of the Britannic Isles appear, with several zones in bright green, all linked by a series of vivid blue lines. The elf explained the size and complexity of the creation the Peverell had built.

"The Gretna Glens were exactly that; many village-sized areas devoted to a lifestyle of hunting, fishing, gathering, and agrarian development with a few specialty artisans spread around as would be needed by the growing population. It started from the main point of arrival on the Isle of Man by enlarging and securing Mistgate Glen, then building up Gretna's Greenery on the shores of the Esk River, and then spreading out very loosely all over those lands that would become the Isle of Man, England, Scotland, and Ireland. The family built seven villages in the beginning, one for the Founders and one for each of their six children who would live there with their spouses, children, apprentices and other employees, banner-men, indentured serfs, and eventually others not related by Blood-Law or Bonds. On the map, you see in colors the first seven villages, then the five passes of expansions that happened over the millenia."

Rubbing a thumb under his chin thoughtfully, Harry remarked softly "That sure is a lot of land that they colonized. And the dotted green lines outside the solid zones would be what they prospected but didn't develop?"

Dobby nodded his assent "Yes Master Harry. The Glens be relatively limited in population so they don't have many buildings in each, from 50 in the smallest up to some 300 structures in the older, more important places like Mistgate Glen. The dotted lines show the wild areas that surround each village to have some living forest to hunt, gather and have building materials locally instead of importing everything from far aways. Even with magic, carting or boating cargo was always a pain. In those days teleportation was a very rare spell, as were short ranged portals that stayed in the Prime Material Plane. It was actually easier to Gate to another dimension then back again, as you could set your arrival coordinates wherever you wanted in the Plane where you wanted to emerge."

The elf explained a bit more: "Likewise, dimensional pockets were huge, cumbersome affairs unlike those you are used to see everyday. The magical district of Hedgerow Terrace was originally one of the last, least enchanted Glens that the Peverell built. The architecture back then was not what you see nowadays, but the Mythal Shield and its many layers of wards is still the original crafting of the Venerable House, still blessed by Hades to this day. All their other villages were built in similar fashion; first exploration, prospection, marking resources and building foundations, then setting the village limits and the outer perimeter of the containment bubble that would exclude monsters, barbarians, parasites, maladies and harsh weather. Then they assembled the conclave to pray, chant, and raise the Mythal over the Glen, to make sure it stayed clean, safe, and out of reach of enemies or corruption for ages to come."

It was Amelia Bones who declared "So we're looking at pockets of livable, protected environment about two miles long by one mile wide, usually centered on a river or lake to have access by boat, towards both the Styx and the other Glens. And these places would all have a number of solid buildings still existent? Would they be ready to receive us, if we were to migrate there to save our kin and charges?" she pressed on the elf anxiously.

Nodding his head firmly, Dobby confirmed "Yes missy Bonesey. The principal methods of linking the glens were the lochs and streams present so they could enact 'water gates' to form a phantom network of pipes between the places they built. Also, they mapped the Styx in the area to set permanent gates in several places. Then they made an effort to map the Border Ethereal as a source of high-magic materials, and possible escape routes if they were ever attacked inside the Glens, despite the wards and physical defenses they built. In the later generations, the Peverell built permanent 'Fire Gates' in most houses and shops, making the basis for the Floo system that modern Britons take for granted. At the same period, the Family created the first mirroromancers, giving them access to the Old Wonder of Fairie, the King's Roads inside the Mirrorscape. They had lots of problems mapping those, and lost many good people to the whims of the Sidhe, or just the beasties that live in there. Hungries for minds and dreams, they bees, always hungries..."

Harry sat forward in his chair, placing his hands on his knees to make certain the elf wasn't scared by his movements. He needed to ask a few more detailed questions that would be important in the coming hours for what the group had to decide.

"Tell me, Dobby, when was the last time that you visited inside the Glens? And which ones did you see? We need to know of they are livable, and if the buildings can be used, in case we need to start moving people there fast. The dementors got loose, and we could need shelter real quick to stay alive."

Dobby replied sadly "It bees at the time of your birth that Dobby goes to see the Glens. It be a private ritual that Dobby have made for himself over the ages. Every time a true Peverell is born, I goes to see what is left of the old heritage, to be ready to bring the new Lord and teach him the ways of his ancestors. But alas, even though there were people born with Peverell blood in them, none had the name or the mind for the last 600 years. Dobby was desperate to see a Lord Peverell again, but only Death and Time make that choice, not house-elves, who only serve. But, a decade ago, most buildings were abandoned. Some had been lived in over the centuries, because the Kinsaver and Peverell Blessings would never close the doors to a being in need who only wanted a sanctuary to end his days in peace, or repent his sins before Death took him for his true judgment. The Mythal Shield blocks many things, no matter by what gate, portal or road you enter, but they never turn away a pilgrim or Lost Soul. That would not be the Way of Hades."

Nodding pensively, Harry asked "That means that a lot of people have been through these hidden Glens over the epochs, right? So a lot of building styles, with lots of different technologies and magicks all mixed side-by-side without rhyme or reason? Is that what we are looking at?"

Dobby agreed with the child's conclusion "Yes master Harry. Each Glen has at least one visitor per generation who stays for a few months or years, depending on many things. Some just use the buildings they understand or need for their crafts, but others built new things, more close to what your kindred are used to seeing nowadays. But, nothing truly modern anywhere. The people attracted to the Glens are usually very old, or very sick, or so desperate that they only seek a quiet place to decide what their End will be. Many have harbored in the Glens only to commit suicide when they had reached Inner Peace with themselves and their Living Gods. Dobby cannot judge them, only knows that such persons not be interested in making new things, just passing through."

Lucius asked in a stressed tone of voice "Do you know if the dementors of Azkaban can enter those Glens? Are they protected from such monsters? If we trust the safety and continuity of our Bloodlines to these places, we must be sure."

The elf nodded slowly, looking at his former master as he answered "Dobby knows that Glens be safe from bad thingies. The Peverell were already done building the original seven Glens and first expansion when madman built Azkaban Island Citadel. He was like the mean, vicious man who was Originator of house-elves. Petty, jealous, and mean against everybody. The dementors are evil spirits, yes, but they are natural creatures, coming from the Border Ethereal Plane. They need lots of negative energy to live and reproduce. When a dementor has enough energy stored inside, it makes another smaller one all by itself. The new one takes many decades to grow if it lives outside the Border Ethereal, but less than five years in it. The bad old mage who built Azkaban was jealous of the Peverell. He summoned the creatures to try to intimidate the Venerable House into submitting to him, surrendering their secrets, magicks, riches, and even their peoples to become slaves. The Peverell prayed to Hades and Gaia, and were given the ways to push back the monsters with the 'Spirit Totem'. That is now called 'Patronus' since the Romans colonized the Isles. The Peverell repelled the first few waves of Dementors manually, giving them the time to analyze the new prayer and create a runic scheme to do the same job, which eventually took them to an arithmantic sequence they could put into the Mythal Shields."

Harry sighed in relief as he sat backwards, analyzing aloud the findings: "So, we have several dozen good villages with buildings in various stages of evolution and maintenance, in partially closed bubbles that only let in those poor souls in search of refuge, or a bed to die at peace. And all of these have already been warded against the worse menace known to the Isles. Not a bad setup, all considered. And as bug-out plans go, not too shabby either."

Hermione asked softly of the foreign house-elf "Tell me Dobby, would a dimensional trunk like this pass through the defenses of the Glens? I would like to bring as much of my ancestral tools and books so that Bode or others like him don't steal or destroy them." The girl proffered towards the elf a shrunken trunk like Harry owned, but a much simpler, store-made 5-lock model.

Dobby passed his hands over the trunk then shook his head negatively with great sadness as he answered her question; "I knows this magic well, missy Her-Mi-O-Ne, but the Glens bees warded against thingies like them to prevent bad guests from bringing weapons or hidden men in their bags when they visited the Peverell, to trade or learn with them. Trunks, bags of holding, robes of many pockets, mokeskin pouches, niffler fur purses, Persian coffer rugs, or asian storage seals, would all be bounced back at the passage into the Mythal Shield, or else be disenchanted violently, making everything spill around in an explosion of stuffs. Even the minotaur's 'dimensional fur' is affected badly. Peoples can only enter the Glens like the Peverell did when they built them, all those centuries ago, with their belongings openly displayed in their hands, or on the deck of their boat, like honest pilgrims do."

Theodore Tonks asked, to be sure he understood, "Are you saying we can't Floo or portkey to those Glens? We absolutely have to go by boat to get inside the safe zones?"

Dobby nodded, confirming "The Water and Fire gates of the Peverell only link together in closed network, they don't connect outside to keep invaders from finding them. The Mythal Shield will bounce away any energy transport you try, be it organic like elf popping, a spell like portkey, or a machine like goblin teleportation pads. Only got in by boat, or maybe by foot if the Glen had a roadway portal built into the dome. Oh! Yous can takes flying brooms or carpets too! But you have to follow the paths that were made for the boats and carts to go inside, no other ways."

Many people in the room grumbled in dismay or outright shouted in anger at what the elf had just told them. More than a few were starting to get hot under the collar at both the speed of events, and the fact that mere children were making the important decisions with the opinions of lowly house-elves being more valid than their own adult ways. Neville got off his chair and shot down all of the protesters with alacrity and determination that made Harry proud.

"Shiiiaaat up, ye mangy curs! The house-elves have signed the same Peverell Alliance oaths as the rest of you's, and they're all still alive and magical to talk about it! So think, before you bitch like mongrel dogs with their tails stuck in a burning oven! This elf is more ancient, more oath-bound, and more loyal to this Alliance, than all of you self-styled great and mighty adults put into one! So yeah, we'll listen to him and believe him before we do any of you's! Anybody else got a problem with the order of things? Cuz I'm sure that challenging the Lord of the Alliance in his own reception hall has got to carry some stiff penalties that make Hogwarts' canings look tame."

Snorting in poorly disguised amusement, Andromeda Tonks gave the pudgy boy a snarky golf clap, all the while verbally lashing the stress-addled fools that were challenging the Lord Black inside the sanctity of his own Manor. Strangely enough, nobody wanted to visit the old dungeons to see if the rack or iron maiden still worked as well as when Orion was reigning Lord.

Moderately pleased by the interruption, Harry took the time to exchange some looks with his age-peers, using some basic spells from the 'Mind's Touch' list to contact their minds to establish a short-lived psychic consensus. The six children discussed rapidly what the gravity of the situation was, and how bad it could get if they were caught out in the open without any fall-back plan already working. The fact that Roderick Bode was a fully trained Unspeakable who had access to all their old equipments and knowledge since he was recruited in the initial phases of the Welsh Blood Purity War of 1975 made him a specially dangerous and unpredictable foe. He had already demonstrated his propensity for multi-fold plans that hid the real objectives, even from his supposed allies or hirelings, so taking him lightly would be fatal. Much to their common chagrin, the children agreed that they had best start exploring and repairing those Glens now, rather than wait until they had an army of wands aimed at their heads by rioters or traitors.

Standing up, Harry let loose his aura so that it be visible to everybody in the hall, the pale purple nimbus embalming him in the deeply negative effluves of his own soul. At the display, everybody froze, paying attention to the child as they could feel that what came next would be vital and change all their lives for however many years they had left to live.

"It is now obvious that we have been collectively outwitted and outplayed by Bode, but only after having weathered the century-long depravities heaped upon our souls by Dumbledore, Grindelwald, Voldemort, Crouch and his corrupt bureaucrats, and the Croaker Brothers." the despondent 12 year old said.

Gathering strength from his familiar, family and friends, Harry continued on a firmer tone; "We did not arrive at this situation by laziness, incompetency, inadequacy, or any perfidies of our fault, for we are the ones who suffered such at the pernicious hands of others. Many others whom usually were so cowardly as to hide behind patsies and drug-zombies to enact their foul depravities, to deflect public opprobrium and retaliations by the victims. We may have lost this portion of the battle, and been made forcibly to retreat from the field, but we are not losing this war, nor will we concede it to any of the adversaries arrayed against our Alliance."

Standing as tall and proudly as he could, Harry declared the decision: "We will travel the misty flows of the Stygian water gates to the ancestral sanctuaries of the Peverell. Yes, we will be limited in our magicks, tools and material means for a short while, that is true. But! We will resurge! We will come back to this domain, and that time we will not be shoved out of our rightful homes again! The Welsh Wiccan wizardry sect is dead and the White Council is defunct! The secondary sects have all oathed to Britannia or fled in silence, knowing the costs of their treason if they were ever caught in the Isles! But we, the Peverell Alliance, are not traitors! We are the victims of a scourge called avarice, a mental disease fueled by other such diseases called bigotry, specism, narcissism and hubris. We have fought these ancient blights many times before and won. We will fight them and win anew! Now, separate by groups and triage the inventory of your estates and persons until it fits only in non-dimensional baggages. Everything exceeding that limit must be shrunk down to be packed securely, or sent to a magical bank that will put it in a vault until the time to assume our lands again has come. Thank you for your attention, and may Hades gaze upon you kindly."

Not having much to respond, the employees or elves just looked to their superiors for confirmation and were still somewhat dismayed that the Lords and Ladies all sided with the child in preparing for a quick, hasty retreat into abandoned hidden enclaves.

x----------x

Neville started up the wizarding wireless to put on some background music to lighten the mood when the program was interrupted brutally at 13:11pm, barely two minutes after being turned on by the boy. It was an emergency broadcast from the wireless central studio in Diagon District, asking urgently for all aurors still present in Britannia to make their way to London to help in destroying a huge, rabid basilisk that was rampaging through Diagon Alley, near the Leaky Cauldron and the most used public passage with the muggle world.

As the poor traumatized reporter tried to describe what he could see from his window was happening in the street far away, the audience heard the harsh noise of his wooden studio door getting bashed in by a powerful curse. Not even two full seconds later, the terrified listeners heard the accursed phrase "Avada Kedavra!" then a few heavy footsteps followed by a stomp as a thick boot kicked the cadaver to make certain he was dead. "Well, that's one less Pureblood to worry about when we help the queen clean up the place. Go ahead, guys. Fiendfyre the building then apparate out before anything points to us." The growling voice said, obscured by charms that modified the sounds coming out of the mouth, like the Unspeakable cloaks did for the agents, back when the Department was active.

In the Black Manor's reception hall, several people suddenly looked terrified and betrayed by what they had heard, until Hermione screamed out in anguish at their reactions. "Stop it, you fools!" She pointed at the fully active spell-users accusingly, berating them with cutting words that left no place for doubts. "Idiots! How many times do you have to fall for the same trickeries before you understand them? That wasn't a muggle-born or squib in there, it was probably Bode himself or one of his paid or imperiused minions doing a hit to distract attention. The fake snake is at work right next to the muggle-world entry point, and some idiot goes on live radio to spout off about killing purebloods in the name of the muggle queen! Honestly, you fools! Isn't that the same basic plan he had made? Set the fake basilisk loose then blame Harry for it? Well! He set the damn thing loose alright, and he's blaming anybody supporting the British crown, of which our good pal Harry is the biggest, staunchest, publicly avowed supporter. Same game but put in a different package so that numskulls won't see they're being hoodwinked again!"

The collective facepalm was almost choreographed to the point it was a thing of beauty that Harry planned to keep in his pensive for years to come. It would make a splendid pick-me-up when he couldn't use alcohol or herbs to do the job. He would even be a good sport and loan it out to his friends, if they asked him nicely.

Amelia Bones shouted stridently "Shut yar faces and get to those inventories! I don't care what your day jobs or salaries were, ya'll in the aurors now! So fall-in or get a stinging hex to the arse right here & now, miscreants!"

As the older folks activated themselves with sorting and repacking everything they had brought that wouldn't make it through the lightweight traveling arrangements, Harry sent a spell at the radio to shut it off and pull out the small crystal power source, which he pocketed deftly. Turning to Kreacher and Jippsy, he told them "I want you to find and unplug every piece of equipment or machinery that runs on crystals, especially Ember plugs or batteries, except the ward core in the basement. Distribute that order to all elves too. I think that Bode killed the radio crew to use the massive antenna on the roof of their studio to try something like the muggle satellites. He's going to try to either find a weak spot in the national ward grid around the borders, or try to find our group to guide the panicking, rioting crowds right to our doorstep. We need absolute silence on all frequencies used by radios, televisions, and similar magical devices, right away."

The elves snapped their fingers in unison, disappearing into the bowels of the manor to work their tasks. A few seconds later, the other elves in the building began to frantically search the packs of their humans to seize and disable all electronics or related items, as well as remove all Ember plugs or circuits to render them inactive. Rhez blinked to the roof of the manor and called an antique child-sized brass telescope to look towards Diagon Alley and the Leaky Cauldron, which could be somewhat perceived from this elevation. The Faerie Drake watched for a few minutes before blinking back to Harry's side with bad news.

"Harry! People!" the small being shouted with a 'sonorus' to boost his voice over the noise of all the hasty preparations, "I think we have a really big problem! The damned golem plowed through the tavern, taking it down and all the muggle repelling wards with the edifice. The snake is rampaging through Charring Cross Road, setting cars ablaze and crushing pedestrians right on the lunch-time rush hour! The police CCTV will see it all, and the people with cameras will have photos for their muggle newspapers faster than the few remaining Obliviators in England can find and spell them into forgetting!"

Hermione put both hands to her mouth in abject fear, whispering harshly "Harry! The Internet! The muggles will transfer the films to news stations all around the planet in hours, if not minutes, and we'll be powerless to stop anything! What can we do?"

"Nothing. We can do nothing, Miss Granger," offered Narcissa Malfoy in as kind a tone as the problem allowed her to have. "We are not the crown, the army or even the parliament anymore. Without any avenue of Power or tools to wield, it is not for us to do anything but flee."

Amelia and Lucius swore crassly in tandem, though their choices of words were different. This wasn't just a civil war amongst British magicals anymore, it was a full-blown collapse of the International Statute of Secrecy! The entirety of Magyck and the planet were at stake!

Hermione shook her head in despair, shouting miserably 'He got his war! The bastard was so desperate to escape from the crown's justice that he did the unthinkable! He sacrificed the entire planet, potentially killing magic and all sentient life, just to breach the national wards and escape! What an utter cretin, that traitor knave! Doesn't he realize that there won't be a single spot on Earth that ANY spell-user or magical creature will ever be free or safe again for decades to come?"

Nymphadora put a comforting hand on the girl's shoulder, trying her best to support her as she said gently "Psychopaths and sociopaths don't see beyond their immediate need, or the goal at the end of their great master-plan. He probably had this turd-nugget in his back-pack for a while, and just kept it in reserve until we accidentally plugged every door and hole he tried to crawl through to reach us. Like Dumbledore, Grindelwald or Voldemort, this sort of bastard will always think along the lines of 'If I can't have it my way, then they can all die' sort of mentality. It wasn't your fault, or Harry's, or even the queen. His sort is called criminal, felon or traitor for very simple, evident reasons, kiddo. Just concentrate on triaging your personal necessities for the trip and let somebody in Westminster worry about the rest."

Draco surprised everybody, especially his parents, by saying offhandedly "The cousin is right, you know? You're a Lady of the Wizengamot, which incidentally was disbanded by the queen who then assumed all authorities and functions of said assembly unto herself, and her muggle government. She wanted a single decisional apparatus, all lined-up under her wand like butterbeer bottles on a table. Well, let's see how her precious new apparatus works this out. We were never asked our opinions, and we don't presently have any positions of authority or Power outside of the Families' charters and lands. So let the army, police, and whomever else, deal with this golem and the parentless bastard who let it loose. It isn't our jobs, the queen made it so."

Susan shoulder bumped Neville, grinning like a loon as she snarked "You just have to hate it when he's right about stuff like this, don't you? Now that he knows he's right, he'll be insufferable for the coming month."

Neville's only answer was to nod vigorously while the aforementioned blond flipped them off.

Summer vacations 1992; This does not Bode well for anyone

(Thomas Arne, 1740 - Rule Britannia)

August 1992  
Multiple locations  
The Britannic Realms, colonies and Commonwealth

The felonious, treasonous, and most probably insane bastard, Roderick Bode stood placidly under the anonymous cover of his old Unspeakable robes. He kept wearing the vestments because they were sinfully comfortable and covered in obscuring and defense charms the likes of which the aurors had never seen. This allowed the criminal to walk around Diagon Alley unseen and unfelt, to enter the Wizarding Wireless offices at morning tea and take his time at preparing his devices to intercept the signals he wanted to detect. Letting loose the fake basilisk with limited instructions was easy, it only had to commit as much destruction as possible in the Alley for ten minutes then blast through the Leaky Cauldron and mess up Elizabeth II's morning brief with her ministers, over at Buckingham Palace by appearing on the city's CCTV.

It was not in any way important that the false beast commit any lasting damages or attack specific targets, although it did have a list of priorities in case it encountered one of them along its rampage. No, the goal for the construct was to suscitate a fear-based reaction out of certain parties, who would then try desperately to contact each other to set a meeting point and time. That was the important goal of this tactical sortie; intercepting the communications of his sworn enemies, the Peverell, Black and Potter of the worlds, so he could trace their comm-lines back to the items and attack right in the midst of their panicked retreat.

This vast conspiracy was nearly five thousand years old, and Roderick Bode was the last living member of the once proud family that had ruled these Isles with an iron fist, until the accursed Peverell had come from another Plane of existence. Bode's ancestors had created the house-elves, only for their masterful constructs to be usurped by the communistic, moralistic fools who believed in equality and equity amongst all species and races. Funny how they didn't think that dementors and their ilk deserved such regards, though.

Nonetheless, the two clanic groups had been waging a secret shadow-war for five millenia, ever since Bode's honored ancestors had figured out what thievery of secrets and sciences the newly arrived family of necromancers and alchemists had committed against them. Slavery was not immoral or despicable, no matter what the idiotic do-gooders said! The entirety of the Multiverse used slavery in one form or another. Even livestock on a farm was one dominant species taking and keeping prisoner other species for the purpose of having a workforce or food. You didn't bitch at dragons for eating humans, so why would you blame the human for enslaving an elf or eating a cow?

But the Peverell had been intractable, and the problem of religious types was that 'God said so' tended to render discussions, philosophy and legality mere details to sweep away under the guise of not being 'Godly' or 'Inspired of Heaven's creed'. The Peverell were all fanatics, and so Bode's ancestors had no choice but to become fanatics in their own rights to defends against this openly declared threat. It wasn't how history remembered things, that was true. But then again, nobody cared to remember that one clan of merchants was stabbed in the back by a clan of worshipers because it didn't matter in the economy and politics of the current day.

Well, it didn't matter until now.

Roderick Bode coughed into his closed fist, looking at the green bile flecked with reddish filaments that came out of his mouth. Sighing in resigned acceptance, the criminal pulled out a small silver flask to sip a quarter ounce of medicinal fluid. He didn't have much time left in this world, not after breaching so many oaths that he had taken falsely to begin with. Mother Mystra's patience with his lies, prevarications and perjuries was coming to an end. He had to close this last chapter of the Blood-Feud between the two clans once and for all.

The Arinyark dust based elixir could diminish the physical damages from Oath-Breaking backlashes, but not the mental effects or the pain. The potion would keep him functional, but just barely. He would get to see the fools of the Welsh Wiccan sect and their muggle allies that dared to sit in governance over his ancestors burn to ash, but not much more. Maybe, if Lady Fortuna favored him one last time, he could also look into the eyes of that rabid cur, the child-Lord Harry Potter, before they both died. He doubted it, but he hoped for it.

Wracked by another spasm, Bode leaned on the wooden table, trying to keep his eyes focused on the machinery dials and ethereal mandalas that showed the live tracking of all magical comm-lines in Britain. It would not be long anymore, he would find the signals he was looking for, the pattern...

Fuck! The pattern! It stopped!

Desperate beyond words, Bode tried to cast the numerology and arithmancy spells again to surf through the diverse streams of data generated by each type of communication or transport used by the wizards and house-elves of Britain for over five thousand years.

To no avail.

The comm-lines he had managed to identify as belonging to a Peverell ally were all gone dark.

Somebody had wised up to his tactic and unplugged each radio, television, Floo, gateway, portkey or flying broom they had to go underground, in silence. And their wands couldn't emit the hidden tag beacons unless they were being used for active castings. Plus, if they used custom foci or spare wands not bought in a wand-crafter's shop, they wouldn't be tagged anyways.

His quarry was now untraceable, and he could not reverse this anymore.

x----------x

Another fit of coughing wracked him hard enough to make him bend over in agony, as a thin filet of bloody phlegm drooled from his open mouth, pooling on the desk between his hands. The criminal only had a second to realize he was no longer alone before he felt a thin stiletto blade slip into his back, between his vertebrae and into his heart, piercing the organ fatally.

Roderick Bode never saw his murderess, but her wild black hair and crazed gaze would have let any Welsh Wizard recognize her on contact. Nobody ever saw Bellatrix Black Lestrange and forgot her in their life. Not if they valued said life anyways.

Turning to her husband and brother-in-law, the fallen noble lady ordered "Now that this moron is taken care of, let's find where my sisters fit into this mess and extract them posthaste. I suspect that poncy git Lucius to be responsible. It would be his style to hire a cracked pot like this one, then let him loose on Britain without a care for the effects on our world."

Sneering in contempt at the dead fool on the floor, she wondered to herself what ever could he have thought, letting the dementors free of their fetters, pushing them out of Azkaban Citadel immediately without giving a single thought to the prisoners' reactions. Sure, some of the poor slobs were too insane or sick to do anything but moan in relief, but others still had some inkling of mindfulness to work with. Killing a dying prisoner to take his bones to create basic hedgecraft foci had been child's play for three experienced, hardened murderers like them. Spelling open all the cell doors as they moved to let free more vectors of mayhem to cover their own escape was a natural decision, and helped them get reacquainted with their magicks as they stalked the halls, looking for the aurors. They needn't bother, as the cowards had fled the moment the Patronus wards around certain blocks of the castle had collapsed, running for the Floo like rabbits being smoked out of a warren by trappers.

Bellatrix pursed her lips, wondering at the strange series of coincidences that had allowed them to leave the dreadful prison island so fast after the dementors had been unchained. Whoever did the job didn't bother with closing the Floo access or keeping the anti-portkey and anti-apparition wards active. Her and the two males had simply walked around the decrepit horror until they reached the warden's office to pass through the Floo just as the fleeing cowards had done, mere minutes ahead of them. And then the imbecile who had done all this didn't even bother to raise the most basic anti-divination wards around himself, allowing a stupid 'Point Me' charm to locate the culprit so she could kill him, just in case he really was that much of a Dark Lord in the making.

Bellatrix was disappointed in how easy the whole escape had been, and her paranoid instincts, honed under the tutelage of Voldemort himself, were firing on all wands, telling her this was a trap of some sorts that they had jumped into. Looking towards her husband, she asked Rodolphus tartly "Where the bloody fucks has Rabastan gone to, now? Did he suddenly see a mudblood he wanted to ride like the bitch she is?"

Her husband stayed absolutely silent, with his eyes looking vacantly straight ahead of himself, not actually seeing anything anymore.

Bellatrix swore crassly as she recognized immediately the murder for what it was. Somebody had silently paralyzed, kept upright and killed her husband, stealing his wand and whatever he had on him before high-tailing it pronto, all before she could finish her task and turn around.

No way Rabastan had the balls to do that to her. He knew her vengeance intimately, and would never dare to bring that chastisement unto his weakling hide. So where was her stupid brother-in-law gone to now? Or more to the point, where had the cadaver been dumped? Because if somebody killed Rodolphus in her presence, they surely killed his brother too, so they could fight her alone or got better odds at fleeing the scene unimpeded.

Her answer came in the form of eight small points of reddish light that blinked into existence at each of the eight corners of the radio control console's room. Eight small runestones hidden under 'unpresence' charms to keep the sickly, damaged witch from seeing them too early. It was as the stones detonated into eight matched tornadoes of Fiendfyre that she finally smelled the raw Promethium oil that had been injected into the insulation layers in the walls and floor.

Then the world was red, and hot, and painful, and she knew no more.

x----------x

Standing on the roof of the Daily Prophet, completely on the other side of Diagon District, the real Roderick Bode coughed bloody phlegm into his gloved fist, shaking from spasms as the malady progressed through his organs. He forcefully struck his chest with his open hand to give his heart some help to keep on beating for a while longer.

Damn! Feeling that 'Simulacrum' die like that had not been pleasant. On the other hand, it was far more autonomous and reliable in the long run than a simple 'Image of Self' that could get dispelled for a sneeze or scraped knee. And the booby trap had managed to fell the rabid bitch when nothing else could have. Bellatrix was recorded in her trial transcripts as a natural sensor for both magicks and life-force, so he couldn't just use an illusion or puppet to fool her because she would have known instinctively that it wasn't a genuine living wizard.

His magical copy had been able to push its magical signature into the woman's senses during the Azkaban takeover only because she was already mentally ill from birth and damaged by the Dementors for over eleven years. It is also why the 'Simulacrum' had been able to drop a telepathic compulsion in her mind to find and kill the man who had freed the Dementors, out of fear he would become too powerful to take-on later.

Turning to the imperiused weakling of an inbred Welsh cur besides him, he asked in almost conversational tones, "Well Rabby, how does it feel to know your bitch sister-in-law has finally bitten the wand-tip? Free at long last, although it did cost you Rodolphus too."

The poor Rabastan had gotten trapped by an automated portkey launcher stuck invisibly to the ceiling in the corridor right next to the radio control room. He never heard the device trigger, never felt the portkey attach to his overly wide and flapping prison garments, and gotten stunned twice on arrival when the transit dropped him. A quick 'syringe of force' to infuse enchanting oil directly into his heart's blood followed by a well felt 'imperius' and he was now a classic potion zombie, ready to serve his master for the next month without objections.

Rodolphus had gotten tagged by the second automated trap, the small reusable turret that was the standard defense for Unspeakable safe-houses in remote, forlorn areas with almost no human presence. The device was a simple low-end wand mounted to a brass pivot and screw-plate that could be bolted, welded or glued anywhere. The wand was pre-loaded with a number of charges and always cast the same spell-chain; 'emergency medical stasis' and 'heart breaker' which were both mid-power neutral energy dweomers that didn't make anybody feel aggressed by the discharge, unlike the Unforgivables and other negative energy powered spells.

Bode's highly detailed and well programmed 'Simulacrum' had spread more than 32 stones engraved with Fiendfyre glyphs around the Wizarding Wireless edifice, and the ones on each side, all through breakfast before going in to try tracing the retched Peverell Alliance bastards. The burn phase was going well and Bellatrix was dead, so another Black scratched off his list, but the tracing had gone dead, so the main job remained to accomplish.

Dammit all! He was seriously running out of time, here!

Sneering in dark amusement at his captive, Bode spoke to him as if they were colleagues out for a pint at the pub to discuss the latest guild project. "Okay my docile friend, give me the portkey coordinates for the ancestral Lestrange Manor and the ward keys to disable the protections. We'll be going -home- for a while. You can grieve your losses in utter silence while I rifle through your cupboards for food, medicine and weapons. The Peverell, Black and Potter won't destroy themselves without our timely help, you know. So, chop - chop!"

x----------x

A couple of seconds later, the duo left the Daily Prophet's roof, Bode never realizing that a pair of curious eyes had seen and heard everything from close by, inside the private owlry that gave the Prophet its capacity to deliver everywhere in Britain the very same day they printed. The small house-elf shivered in dread and rage as one of the hidden descendants of the Originator was making himself known at long last.

Dobby-elf must be made aware!

The elf popped, leaving its post silently to reach a neutral position atop Big Ben clock tower, then scanned for the venerable elf. Finding him, he sent a request for urgent message, then transferred mentally what he knew when he got permission. He received confirmation that Dobby was aware and plotting a response already. His true job done, the elf returned to the Daily Prophet's roof to care for the owls, as the innocent birds had done nothing wrong that they would deserved to be abandoned in the middle of strife like this.

Summer 1992; The Reveal of Magic

(Requiem de Profundis)

August 1992  
Multiple locations  
All over Earth

It was the day after the mess had hit Diagon Alley and crashed through the massive five hundred year old wards of the district, right into muggle-filled Charring Cross Road during the end of lunch hour rush. In a sector filled with muggle businesses, restaurants, professional offices and dozens of municipal police Closed Circuit Tele-Vision (CCTV) cameras that watched the very popular merchant street day and night without rest.

It was about 24 hours since the magical world had been forcibly and violently exposed to the eyes of the muggle world, giving rise to immediate panic and calls from diverse religions to assemble into Crusades, Inquisitions, Autodafe's or Great Cleansings all over again. For most of the Earth, it was like the clock had stopped in the Year 1500, before the Middle Ages ended to let through the Renaissance and the Illumination of Science through the obscurantism of religion and peasant superstitions. Governments honestly tried, most of them anyways, to keep their populations from going berserk with fear, bigotry, and antiquated church doctrines.

In some places though, efforts were not that hard or sustained.

x----------x

In the United Kingdom and its remaining colonies, the queen had passed a decree forbidding any and all 'witch hunts' or similarly inspired movements of religious or superstitious nature. She had promised her population a televised address on the subject for the coming Wednesday evening, when she would enlighten the entire British Commonwealth about the magical societies.

x----------x

Across Europa, Slavia and Russia, most of the current nations had a very lengthy history of partially successful cooperation with their magical ethnic groups or partner non-human nations. Also, most knew full well that having a few million soldiers bred, born and raised in warrior cultures come out swinging wouldn't end well, so they all worked on keeping their muggle people stable. Not quiet, there would be some protests, and a maybe religious rioting, but no European state would let events come anywhere near civil war, even if it led to brutal repression with army tanks rolling in the streets. Even the Pope in Rome ordered the Catholic prelates to assist in keeping all their flocks calm, to wait for the official explanations from England.

x----------x

The countries in Central, Far and Minor Asia, were neither impressed nor surprised by the revelation of magic in England. They knew it was coming as soon as the first photographic cameras had been built, and cinematography had only confirmed it. Now, in the epoch of digital film and CCTV security across several cities, plus orbiting satellites, the Asian nations were mostly annoyed at the world's lack of readiness than at the coming-out of magicals.

In a very simple but grandiose ceremonial held in the Forbidden City, the Dragon Emperor of Quin, a six thousand year old archmage that had become an Imperial Power-Lich, ascended the Jade Throne anew. He would now rule publicly as was his right, instead of doing it quietly from the depths of his opulent mausoleum.

The Communist Party confirmed that this had been the Order of Things for six millenia and they had to be accepted by the Antique Monarch to rule as they did. For the Chinese People, this was as good as they needed; they could have a spiritual leader strong enough to surpass corruption while having a better way of life than the wild capitalism of the West.

The rest of the Asian Nations revealed their own occult communities pretty much the same way, including by having parades of monks making illusions to liven up the retelling of their Creation Myths. The Hindus had a grand ceremony with Devas, Celestial beings from their Pantheon, walk in the streets to bless the poor and heal the sick as proof that magic was real and good.

x----------x

The African Tribes who had maintained spiritual and magical roots were pretty much laughing at the world right now, until they came crashing back down to reality when war-lords, drug cartels and corrupt muggle officials escorted by soldiers tried to take over their villages. Even in the largest cities, local and regional muggle officials moved by fear, religious zeal or greed, rushed to get their hands on as many magicals as they could, to either enslave, sell or execute, according to their own necessities. But it wouldn't last for long.

Within days of the Reveal in England, charismatic preachers of many faiths were whipping the muggle crowds to frenzies of bigoted, superstitious fanaticism that made most of the African countries implode back into civil wars they had though stopped at long last. Nobody knew how far it would go, nor how much damages would be done, but civilization and social organization in Africa died at break-neck speed before anybody could do anything.

x----------x

In the Arabic Nations, the situation was truly a mixed bag. Some countries started to implode immediately while others did like Asia, regrouping around an occult personage of traditional authority whom all political and religious actors could agree upon as leader.

Unfortunately, because of the recent colonization by Europeans in the last eight centuries and the spread of christianity, many took the news that Jesus had died 900 years ago while Yahweh and Allah were never real as an attempt to colonize them again. Many devout muslims cried foul while the jewish peoples accused all of planning yet another genocide against them. In all cases, even the few basins of logic in the Middle East were soon aflame in the throes of bigotry, specism and anti-magic paranoia.

x----------x

In the North-American sub-continent, clear societal cleavages appeared from day one, and it got ugly faster than anybody could have predicted.

Canada chose to have their mundane federal government hold a series of public addresses on TV by the Prime Minister on several important subjects, with each being followed by a visit to a magical enclave by a Radio Canada camera crew to slowly acclimatize their populations to each other. This slow, careful and polite process had actually started to work, until events in the USA started being broadcast to the world at large. Then, everything got upended and Canada dropped down a slope that would take decades to climb back up.

In the United States (USA) the population had been characterized for three centuries by religious and superstitious beliefs that routinely defied or flat-out ignored the most basic scientific proofs that had been gathered by learned men.

Because of the electoral system that made that pretty much every important job at the local, regional and federal levels were in fact elected by popular vote, religiously motivated (bigoted) people often got put in place, despite that they lacked any competency for the job at all. Very few elected postings had actually legally mandated tests or skill sets required, and even more rarely were there obligations to prove worthiness to occupy the job, since The Voting People were deemed sovereign and absolute in their choice to elect or not.

This meant that when magic was accidentally revealed, hundreds of local, regional and federal officials stood up to affirm their Faith in Jesus and the Christian Creed that all witches were evil, and that it was a holy act to burn them after a forceful, deliberate and methodical Inquisition of their many sins against God and his Church. Instead of calming the population or forcing the state governments to quell these fanatics, the sitting president, George H. W. Bush, a Republican who was facing a tough reelection vote the coming November, decided to throw his lot with the churches. He illegally deployed the US Army inside the national borders to help the mayors and governors who felt they had a duty to God and Cross to gather the witches to stand Tribunal before the Inquisition of the Men of Biblical Faith.

Not to be outdone or let the white anglo-saxon christians take away their own rights to examine these unholy beasts under the lens of their faiths, the immigrants from muslim, jewish, buddhist, vaudoo, and hundreds of other sects clamored to be allowed to run their own religious tribunals before anybody got executed. Not that they thought the end of the witches would, or should, be any different. It was that the priests from these groups had their own clienteles to satisfy; thousands of poorly educated, superstitious muggles assembling in the streets to riot violently against the fact that their religious prerogatives and beliefs were being thrown to the trash by America's white christian elites, in Washington DC and the state capitols.

The news precipitated the entire country to plunge into an immediate civil war that split the nation asunder within the first two weeks of infighting. Even the use of the mighty US Army's columns of M1A1 Abrams tanks and Bradley IFV's didn't manage to turn back the tides of riots and religiously fueled madness that President Bush had unwittingly unleashed by his move. In the first week of September 1992, the United States ceased to exist as a country and half the individual states followed in the week right after, with the last surviving regional governments falling to revolution and coup d'état by church-mongers no later than September 20th. By the start of October, not a single city, town or village, had any mayor or council in post and most police or state trooper stations had been ransacked by rebels or survivalists.

The result was that Canada and Mexico became almost immediately embroiled in the same social mechanics as the USA within barely two days of George Bush's fatidic decree. The large population of white, anglo-saxonic christians that had been the building block and economic engine of Canada for the last 200 years turned against their federal and provincial governments with the same speed and fanaticism as the Americans. The country was ripped apart, especially when the people of Quebec province, much closer philosophically to France and Europe than to America, tried to resist the churches by banning faith-based bigotries and anti-magic preaching. This attempt at maintaining civility saw an immediate explosion of 'Quebec Bashing' in the rest of Canada that pushed the religious groups inside the territory to start declaring themselves to be 'Sovereign under Jesus their God' and not responsible before men or laws of men. As a result, the country of Canada died in misery at mid-September and no town had any lawful governance left by the first week of October 1992.

Mexico almost immediately ceased to exist as a cohesive nation as the religious sects were now descending into open warfare between themselves. The traditional Olmec, Aztec, Inca, Maya and other tribal groups got into fierce battles with the protestant and catholic christian churches that had been created by European colonizers since the 1600's. At the same time, the drug cartels and several old, wealthy clans started to tear apart the communities and villages around their holdings to hijack some form of authority for themselves. It was total anarchy, and it started spreading up north since a lot of Mexican citizens blamed the USA for the damages to their society due to the anti-drug raids, or they were refugees trying to escape to safety from the churches that were following them to kill them. In any case, it always ended in violence, especially when the people in the US saw groups of armed Mexicans trying to cross into their lands, which they always answered with guns and more guns.

x----------x

In the Central and Southern American sub-continents, many federal, regional and municipal officials listened to what was coming out of Argentina to orient their decisions. The muggle government publicly declared their month-old alliance with the 'Exalted Council of Christian White Magicks' then officially ceded all powers and authorities to them as per church decree.

This created the beginning of riots in the streets that were easily crushed by a single demonstration of Celestial Power by the hand of the archangel Danael of Concord, who appeared in a burst of golden light in an erupting favela. He manifested mandalas around himself, adjusting the ethereal sigils then triggering the massive spell without moving the people from where they were standing. In a matter of seconds, the entire poverty stricken favela was turned into a beautiful, newly built district able to house all of the poor who dwelt there without overcrowding.

Despite the positively medieval aesthetics, each new masonry building rose tall upon deep, solid foundations with connections to the new municipal sewer tunnels and utilities that brought fresh water, gas, electricity, television cable and Internet wires to all apartments, offices or boutiques. New walls and gate-keeps circled the district to guide traffic and limit criminality, while workshops and small industries would allow to locally produce the foods, clothes, tools and other items the residents needed. No longer would there be deaths from famine or lack of medical care.

The demonstration made by Danael radicalized the Argentinian population in favor of the christian Faith and Creed, so they did as the archangel and the Senior Council told them. They accepted in their hearts as citizens those who converted to Jesus, even if they were magicals or not human. For any who refused to kneel before the church's officially enacted authority, the Permanent Inquisition of Christ would treat them the same way, be they relapsed muggles, heretic wizards, or infidels of other species. The White Council declared that "This is the Time of Jesus, our Lord Redemptor, and no one will take that from His Holy Hand! Kneel in submission or be destroyed by fire and clean steel!"

The Pope in Rome tried again to tell people to beware of the Denarian sect and their betrayals, that they were not loyal to Jesus but had in fact helped to kill him. Th message passed, but not with the results that the Pontiff had expected.

All of the Central and South American countries had been colonized repeatedly by Spanish Jesuits who had a very particular take on their Faith and just how far the authority of Rome extended into their sect, even if they were nominally subordinates of the Pope. Just like the Templar Knights or the Freemasons, the Jesuits thought that their calling to Jesus was more vital than obedience to a human bureaucrat. Given this specific mindset inflicted to the populations of the South American countries, they started to fold one by one, their populations taking to the streets in bloody revolts. The people toppled their governments unless the elected officials voluntarily abdicated all powers to the White Council and the angels of Jesus Christ. The fact that Jesus was dead for nine centuries was believed by everybody you could ask, but they all said they also believed he would be resurrected by his angels as that was a Prophecy from Roman times, and those Seers were always good with their esoteric stuff.

So, by the end of September 1992, most of the countries in the middle and southern portions of the Americas had fallen, and by mid-October they all officially responded to the 'Throne of Jesus' in Argentina. Given the size of the three American continental segments, the White Council decided to move the self-styled Throne up to the Panama Canal and magically build a brand new city to house their new 'Basilica Christu Papalis' for all times to come.

Summer 1992; The trip to Mistgate Glen

(Frederic Chopin – Funeral March)

1st October 1992  
Multiple locations  
The Britannic Realms, colonies and Commonwealth

It had all come to this, in the End.

Twelve year old Harry Potter looked out of the small round window that let moonlight into the attic space of #12 Grimmauld Place, his gaze aimed over the roof-line of the surrounding houses and office buildings. It the distance, he could see several thick columns of black smoke raising towards the heavens, indicating that yet more unfortunate souls had met inhumane ends at the hands of vigilantes and religious fanatics this night.

Heretics burning at the stake, in the streets of Central London, in 1992.

The country was in a civil war, despite all that queen Elizabeth II had tried to do to push back the tides of idiocy, superstition and treason. The White Council's demonstrations of Celestial Power at the behest of archangel Danael of Concord at lit the fuses to millions of small kegs of unstable chemicals that were all exploding in deleterious, toxic batches all over the Earth Sphere. It hadn't taken long for the catholic and protestant prelates of England to whelm their ecclesiastes and worshipers into publicly disavowing the entire Anglican denomination as a bastard creation of a felon king who had spurned the Church Law of the Pope and Rome. In accordance to this, the Anglicans were not real christians but impostors deserving punishment. However, if any of the usurper sect's members made publicly their acts of contrition and tithed the true Mother Church under the White Council, then they could be baptized and forgiven for a new life of Faith.

This decree pronounced on television, radio and through magically printed newspapers was sent throughout all of Britain in the last week of September, and by the 28th, Her Majesty the queen was dead by the hand of a newly self-radicalized chamber maid, in Dover Castle where the House of Windsor had sought refuge from the carnage in London, a week before. The event did not even give lieu to a succession contest since all of the Windsors were murdered in the same day. Christian assassins commanded by the White Council were portkeyed into the citadel while the wards were sapped by a conclave of fanatical Jesuits. When Dover Castle and military station fell to the priests and their rioting supporters, it rang the death knell of any civilian government in Britain, the colonies and Commonwealth.

That had been two days passed, and things had gotten steadily worse since.

A cabal of several elderly Jesuits had assembled in the smoking ruins of Buckingham Palace to decree that, from now on, the Permanent Inquisition of Christ would be the official policing institution of the British Land. They commanded that all Englishmen were now Christian citizens, duly bowing in honorable service to the Basilica Christu Papalis in Panama, as was expected of any loyal devotees of the Cross. Therefore, any entity of any species or magical capacity that knelt before the Altar of Jesus to repent, offer Tithes and accept Baptism into the Creed, would be given citizenship rights and protection by the Holy Mother Church. Yes, those rights would vary in quality and options according to several factors, like species/race, age, gender and mystical competencies. If you were non-human but very good at healing or potions, you could get as much rights as a normal human wizard who had a job as mid-level governmental manager without any troubles.

While many humans were at first suspicious or completely opposed to this offer of rights, the priests reminded them of the Creed of Christian Faith; "Open your arms to those rendered ill or damaged by lives of hardship, and welcome them in the fellowship of Christ that they be reborn into the Redeeming Light". With such a powerful imperative, the majority of worshipers started to relent on their violent, bigoted tendencies to instead try to proselytize others since the church gave generous rewards to those who successfully converted Anglicans, pagans or naturalists. The second fact that made people accept the church's semi-open stance was the systematic application of oaths. From the simplistic citizenship oath everybody was obliged to take, passing by the Baptismal Vow, all the way up to the Oaths of Office or Vows of Sacerdoce, everybody in the jurisdiction of the White Council was being made to line-up to get new magically printed ID card, passport, health insurance card, and others along with corresponding oaths signed in blood.

The level of control and policing implied by the vast operation didn't escape anybody, nor did the wording of the clearly totalitarian and fascistic governing style under-pining the whole system. The White Council were preaching real well about helping the poor and needy, giving second chances and offering Penance Rites to those who sought the Light after a life of Darkness. They were very good at orchestrating, presenting, and showing-off their Faith, Creed and Cause in front of the TV cameras, in churches, school gymnasiums or public sports stadiums that were full to the rafters with believers and new converts. The International Christian Flag was now floating over half the countries that used to have a seat in the UN Assembly, while the muslim nations and Asian monarchies were slowly building up their military capacities to defend themselves from the inevitable push to convert by threats and force, just like the Israelis, Europeans and Americans had been imposing on them for nigh on ten centuries already.

A planetary war was coming, and soon.

The gormless, mindless fools of the White Council would never listen to anything else than the spasms in their ballsack; to protect the image of their Power and mighty manhood they had built inside their heads, they would wage war. Even if all the numbers showed they would not win, that they could not even make a draw or null-match with the opposing factions, they would go to Crusade and destroy as much of the infidels, unbelievers and heathens as their soldiers could lay hands on before their Nazi-like structure of mongrels collapsed on top of them. Harry was sure they would commit collective suicide by unwinnable warfare before Yule, at the end of the current year. 1992 would be the last year that any significant presence of Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists was recorded. All the great monotheist religions were gearing for a cataclysmic showdown that would shake the continents and raze entire countries off the maps, along with their virgin forests, fresh lakes, wild animals, and any chances of rebirth in the coming century.

Like a forest fire or flooding, Gaia was making the Earth cleanse itself of parasites and diseases, resetting the system for the next phase of the sentient species' evolution. Harry just hoped that there was enough peoples of various groups left to rebuild, more than just a few isolated clutches of destitute and desperate survivors who would descend to atrocities to stay alive.

{ HP } --- { The last message from Gringotts } --- { HP }

Walking down to the ground floor, Harry reached the reception hall where all the members of the Gretna Glens expedition corps were assembling. They now had more people than just the Peverell Alliance. In the last week of September, when things had taken a turn for the very worst, the goblin king Ragnok Backsnapper had contacted Harry via mirror. People from the magical side of Britain had taken refuge in the bank, using their vaults as temporary lodgings by living in dimensional trunks. Several of these, Ragnok thought, could actually be valuable to whatever schemes the young child-Lord was preparing for his Alliance.

Getting the selected people from Gringotts to Grimmauld Place had been a joke, given just how easy to do it had been. First, the volunteers had to submit all of their vaults, trunks and persons to invasive full scans by the goblin shamans. Once cleared, they had to sign a preliminary oath to abide the negotiations with the Peverell Alliance in good faith, without bigotry, and to sign on the work report that detailed the reasons why the discussions failed, if no Treaty or service contract was produced. After that, the persons concerned were put in medical stasis, in their dimensional trunks which were shrunk and passed through the secured mailbox, just as a regular bank parcel would be.

Once inside Black Manor, the potential allies or contractors were identified, scanned, tagged into the wards as visitors to watch carefully, and then revived under guard. From then, the negotiations started in earnest, as time was short for all of them. In fact, Harry sat all the perspective Allies in the same room to explain the situation, options, and results expected, to everybody at the same time, so there be no different versions floating around the group.

The people the goblins had sent through were not all known to Harry, although he did know the reputations of a few through his research on Magical Britain, or folios from the goblins that had been suggested as ways to increase his business investments in the long term.

x----------x

Xenophilius Lovegood, Head of Family, Lord of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Lovegood, and his sole daughter Luna, Heiress Presumptive. They were the owners of the Daily Prophet's only credible competitor magazine in the British Isles, and especially in the Welsh Wiccan population. They were old allies of House Potter for nearly eight centuries. He had no elves but had brought his magical printing press, stacks of printing supplies, food, tools and pretty much the contents of his house.

x----------x

Garrick Ollivander, Head of Family, Lord of the Venerable and Spiritual House of Ollivander, along with his two grand-daughters, Vilisia, Heiress Presumptive, and Vesulia. The Ollivanders had been master wand-crafters for nearly 2,700 years and were the founders of the British guild of occult foci artisans. They were historical allies of the Peverell, until the House went into stasis seven hundred years back. He had brought his entire boutique and workshop of finished wands and raw materials, with two elderly house-elves and a horned owl.

x----------x

Camden Greengrass, Head of Family, Lord of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Greengrass, with his wife Lady Camilla, and their two daughters, Daphne, Heiress Presumptive, and Astoria. He had brought five house-elves and the contents of his ancestral manor, plus the harvests from seven greenhouses and three fields in stasis trunks, and one trunk that had livestock still awake and ready to use. They had several tools for farming, ranching, butchery or apothecary crafts. They were recent allies of House Black in the last century.

x----------x

Franklin Devin Longbottom, Lord Emeritus of House Longbottom, and his wife, Lady Dowager Alice. Besides a few personal belongings retrieved from storage, they were coming straight from the long-term spell damage ward of St-Mungo's hospital. Everything else the Family owned was already in the care of the current Lord Longbottom, their only son Neville.

While they were no longer bed-ridden, they were using walkers to move, and wheelchairs on bad days, but they were awake, lucid, and coherent when speaking with visitors. Their magicks were about one fifth what it used to be, but that would get better with practice, like physiotherapy after a coma.

x----------x

Severus Tobias Snape, Head of Family, Lord-elect of House Prince in Abeyance, master potion brewer, master alchemist, master apothecary, and doctor of pharmacy. He was coming straight from the long-term spell damage ward of St-Mungo's hospital. He brought the two elderly house-elves that had taken care of the Prince ancestral manor while it was locked by Gringotts as they waited for him to come accept his heritage. His personal property from his days at Hogwarts as teacher were in a dimensional 7-lock trunk.

He had been a good, close friend of Lilian Evans, and was the oath-bound god-father of Draco Malfoy, much closer than just House Ally. While he was able to walk with only a cane as aid, he was not solid on his legs, his magicks were still wonky from the Squibbing Oil treatments that saved him, but his mind was back to his full, powerful self without any psychic damage other than a few memory holes.

x----------x

Terrence Goyle, Head of Family, Lord of the magical House of Goyle, had brought his wife Lady Ludmilla, and his two children, Gregory, Heir Presumptive, and his daughter Cassandra. They had two house-elves besides them, plus three owls and some livestock in a stasis trunk with their farming tools. They had specialized in harvesting animal parts for potions or food. They were allies of House Malfoy for the last two centuries.

x----------x

Cantankerous Nott, Head of Family, Lord of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Nott, had brought his grand-son Theodore, Heir Presumptive. The elderly man was a priest of the Forest Dwellers, apostle of The Old Ways, but also unfortunately quite the blood purist. He brought four house-elves, some livestock, a travel altar and an apothecary's home-visit box.

He had written a book in the 1920's that was seen as a seminal opus for Pureblood power. In reality, he had had been dead broke at the time and preferred to accept a commission to write a small research folio that had been asked by a noble Lady from house Selwyn. The old woman died halfway through the writing, so the man had finished the tome and published his 'Sacred 28' as a private study report, like many academics do each year. His success was totally unexpected, as was the sudden desire by many to own a copy for displaying in their study as a proof of their good standing amongst the noble families of wizarding Britain.

It averred that Cantankerous Nott had never been truly specist nor bigoted on Blood, he just deplored that most of the school courses on culture, etiquette and ancient rituals had all been abandoned in the name of a populist movement that was not a true modernization society. There were no more official ways to acclimatize the new-blood arrivals into the Welsh Wiccan sect to make them proper, functional wizarding citizens. And that was on top of the utter depravity the Wizengamot had done of allowing all the schools to stop teaching traditional witchery and hedgecraft as primary education, back in 1929. Nobody still knew anything about HOW that calamity had been perpetrated.

x----------x

Besides these notable persons of the Welsh sect, Gringotts had also sent forward three dozen simple citizens from Hedgerow Terrace and Knockturn District that they had good relations with. The goblins knew that these humans would not be able to survive long beneath the Earth's crust in their nation's tunnels, for diverse reasons of mental health requirements. So, they had sent them to the one Alliance that still had any chance to give them a good, safe home on the surface. Most were simple farmers, herbologists and low-powered hedge-witches, but all had good skills at homesteading and caring for a community. There were no children, elderly or ailing persons in this group, as the goblins had chosen them to maximize the entire group's chances to thrive.

Harry had no initial troubles with any of the people sent, from the poorest to the richest, because he already knew a lot of them personally or from their reputation. In reality, he was glad that his friend Neville had his parents back after so many years, and felt the same for Draco. On the other hand, he was trying to comfort Hermione as she had now idea what her parents were living through, or how to reach them without putting herself and friends in danger. Many christian sects had started to actively wiretap the muggle comms to find muggle-born who were trying to reunite their families to go to safety. The worse part was that several of them had been betrayed by the very people they had been trying to give shelter to, their own jealous or paranoid relatives.

The situation was now deteriorated far beyond the capacity of any single child to change or affect significantly, no matter how many Titles, Houses, Ranks, Styles and Positions he held. This world was no longer fit for higher sentient species to dwell, let alone untrained children.

The Gates amongst the Mists beckoned into the Far-Aways.

{ HP } --- { The refugees flee } --- { HP }

It was now the dawn of October 3rd, and the Alliance had accepted all the arrivals from Gringotts, after deliberations from the established members. Three of the eldest house-elves, Kreachers and the two House Prince servants, would stay behind in Grimmauld Place to keep the wards active and broadcast news to the refugees via mirror comms.

If ever the small community managed to find a way to pass the dimensional trunks through the Mythal Shields, the elves would then send forward all the remaining baggages and follow through to join their families. Until then, they would stay as rear-guard and self-destruct device for the ancestral properties that had been set into stasis, should religious fanatics find them.

None of the departing humans wanted this, but all three elves were far too old and on the verge of sickness to make such a lengthy trip, especially once they were on the boats to pass from Mistgate Glen into Gretna's Greens and further. Not to mention that if the poor beings were exposed to just a few seconds of negative energy from the Border Ethereal, it would spell their deaths right away in a matter of seconds. Even for the distraught humans and other elves, this was a better solution than a harsh death on a rough trail, without burial as they could not leave trace of their passage.

With the first rays of true dawn rising above the horizon, Harry transferred full control of Black Manor's ancient wards and secrets to the honorable servant, gifting him a Blessing of Hades and Gaia as he did so. Dobby tried to heal and increase the health of the elderly elves by offering them a herbal potion with a single drop of his own blood mixed in, which they gratefully drank, just as the group was leaving.

With the early hour and the late fighting that had happened in the streets around all night, the surrounding neighborhood was quiet, and would be so until nearly morning tea at 10:30am. Taking a calculated risk, the manor wards were modulated just a bit to permit outgoing gateways towards the Styx River demi-plane so that the refugees could be out of sight from the religious fanatics for the first leg of their trip.

x----------x

The Styx was a truly odd conception of the Multiverse. Basically it was a large river with a band of ground on each side that was inside a thin dimensional pipe with an underground and atmosphere up to the cloud ceiling, and a bit above that.

The weird part came when the demi-plane adjusted in width and height to the size of the ships that passed, a bit like the esophagus of a snake that distends to let pass a critter thrice the size of the mouth to avoid choking. This was made even more amusing by the fact that the demi-plane then shrank back to its basic size once the ship had passed. If your boat was smaller than the current fluvial basin, then the pipe didn't react at all.

There were zones with barely enough ground or stone on each side for insects to cling to the walls of the canyons, while in other areas the river widened to form huge lakes with vast prairies, forests and mountain ranges with fresh water rivers flowing into the Styx itself.

And that was the other problem with the Styx River; its water was toxic in a way that nobody wanted to suffer. Whether your drank it raw, used it in cooking, bathed in it, fell in it or just got sprayed a mite by mist from the boat's bow in waves or rapids, you would get affected.

You would lose all of your memories, and your sense of Identity as well.

Precious few people had ever discovered or understood HOW and WHY this happened to most species, including humanoids born in the demi-plane. Likewise, nobody knew why certain species were naturally bred with an absolute immunity to this phenomenon that let them swim in or drink the accursed waters. For the average traveler, the only solution was to collect rainwater or find potable fresh water streams on the shorelines. For protection, most used boosted personal hygiene wards or energetic hydrophobic shields in the form of metal rings or jewelry. Some sets of runes could be embroidered into clothing to protect from the Styx water effects, but only for a short time.

Presently, where the refugees entered the riverine demi-plane, the climate was somewhat close to a temperate forest with a mix of leafy, deciduous and conifer trees. Tracks in the underbrush suggested animals the size of boars, bears and great cats prowled the zone as it hadn't been used by humans or civilized societies in a great long while. No ruins or construction remains were discovered, which was expected.

The first jobs of the refugees were to build wood fires to boil snow for fresh water and cook breakfast for the workers. The able-bodies transients were split in two groups; the wood cutters and the carpenters who shaped the raw trunks into planks and parts. When enough pieces were set aside, the two groups merged to assemble a boat of similarly simple design as the Peverell forebears had used to arrive on Earth, five millenia ago. These shallow draft river boats would be sufficient to travel the Styx from (equivalent) Central London to the Isle of Man's northern point.

Given the size of the group, now being one Faerie Drake, 73 humans, 41 elves, and many diverse familiars or livestock, mostly shrunk in non-dimensional stasis cages, they would need at least 8 boats to hold 15 persons per conveyance. Each flat-bottomed boat was only sixty feet long by twelve wide, with a true depth of six feet, but the bottom two were a cargo hold with decking planks atop to make a flat floor to walk, work and sleep on. The short masts raised twenty feet above the side railings, with a single triangular sail and rigging. Small wood shingle roofed shelters would be built at the stern and bow of each boat to shield the crews as much as possible from the wintry weather, which was becoming execrable quite quickly.

In fact, barely an hour inside the demi-plane and the refugees had to stop making boat parts to focus on raising earthen huts to shelter the logging camp from the incoming blizzard that was threatening to turn into a full-on white-out. With temperatures dropping under zero as fast as people could use their spells to raise the fieldstone walls and thatched roofs, nobody had any time to spare for decorations or niceties between neighbors anymore. The group contented themselves of making simplistic 'Butt & Ben' huts; buildings that were forty feet long by twenty wide, a single story without any real floor except beaten dirt, with exposed rafters and roof underpinnings. The floor plan was two main rooms of 17 x 20 feet with a 6 x 10 bathroom and 6 x 2 closet as mid-point separation. To spare fuel and ease heating, the two stonework open hearths were set against each wall of the bathroom. This allowed for light and heating water in the bathing/toilet area, while allowing a cooking fire in the main room (Butt) and a second fire to keep sleepers hot with warm tea over the embers in the bedroom (Ben).

To make things safer and easier to defend from predators or bandits, a genuine danger in the Styx and most planes of existence, the refugees built 15 huts able to hold 8 persons that were placed in a large circle around a central bonfire that was shielded from the weather by hastily engraved runes in the stones that elevated the wood logs above ground to give them air to burn bright. It was a good decision to abandon the logging to build the small, cramped dwellings as the damned snowstorm lasted two full days without respite, the winds howling through both nights straight.

On the morning of October 5th, their third day in the Styx, the refugees were able to leave their huts to witness the harsh, indomitable Power of Nature. The entire landscape was white with snow as far as the naked eye could see, with barely a few patches of green in the higher portions of the trees that had lost their cold blanket from swaying too much in the winds. Even on the river itself, small ice floes were floating idly down the current, as if nothing worth mentioning had happened.

Yep, the weren't in merry old England anymore.

x----------x

Given that many had very low magical power, they set to trap or hunt in the vicinity so as to spare the refugees' provisions and livestock as much as possible. This lead Harry to show his stone-bow, leaving it to the most senior hunter for the day as a template for the others to copy the device as the group's basic weapon. At supper that night, every hunter in the camp would have a stone-bow made for their own size and a pouch full of round stones. In the coming days, those stones would get runes to improve impact strength, range and accuracy, all three together as the standard set. The house-elves were the ones scripting the stones in the evening, as a pastime to keep them busy as they chatted with the people in the hut they dwelt.

With 114 able people to split chores, the camp got to work quickly at logging and carving wooden planks, masts and yardarms, pulleys and blocks, and hardened bark shingles for the deck shelters' angled roofs. By the end of the first day, two boats were fully assembled and waterproofed, waiting atop wooden pylons on the shoreline to be put in the river when the rest was ready too. Each day after that saw two boats completed until all eight people carriers were built and ready.

During the group meeting that evening, the people decided that two more boats should be built to better spread the refugees down to 10 or 12 per hull, and have some free space if one or two of the boats sank for whatever reason the Multiverse sent them. The decision was easy to make, and it wasn't as if they had a fixed calendar to keep; the Glens were always open, you just needed to know by which route to make your entry and fit the criteria programmed in the Mythal Shields.

After a fifth day and ten boats fully assembled, the refugees slept easily that night, leaving only one sentry per hut, just in case. Come October 11th, the eighth morning of their trip, the travelers were happy to put the boats in the river and climb aboard for what most saw as the real beginning of the road towards freedom and a chance at starting a new community.

Nobody in the entire group had ever been a boatman before in their lives.

It took quite a few tries and many spells to get the boats going in the proper order. The elves were split between all hulls to give a safety net, in case they cracked the keel on hard ice, somebody was on the verge of falling overboard, or could get splashed by a wave. The completely sealed bow shelters were not just to protect from cold and snow, they were specifically designed to act as raised plows to deviate bow-spray away from the crew and deck of the boat. Each rudder-man saw ahead of his boat via a cheaply enchanted sheet-steel mirror linked to a glass ball atop the mast giving a colorized panoramic view, for up to 100 feet in front of the hull's ice deflector spur.

Even with small metal braziers alight in both shelters of each boat, plus a line of scriptworkes to enact a 'climatic shield' around each hull, the crews were sorely tested by the biting winds and occasional cloud of fluffy powdery snow that crossed the river randomly. The house-elves worked hard at putting embroidered 'climatic aura' and 'body temperature optimization' scripts on the clothes of everybody, including themselves. It was the combination of these multiple layers of warmth and cold deflections that kept anybody from suffering frostbite or losing limbs from the low temperatures alone.

Even when they stopped the boats by the river shores for the night to avoid hitting flotsam or animals, and the shelter's canvas doors were sealed tight, sleep was uneasy and a chilled misery. All the groups' brewers, alchemists and apothecaries were busy making a variant of the nutrient potion used by nordic populations that had a slow warmth release built-in, that granted the user an increase of 10 degrees Celsius for eight hours throughout their body. Yet another reason that nobody lost limbs, especially the rudder-men that piloted the boats as the wooden tillers were freezing their fingers despite thick leather gloves and warmth runes engraved on the handles.

{ HP } --- { The Gatekeeper's Market } --- { HP }

It took the refugee convoy two miserable weeks of boating in the weak bleak daylight, and sleeping in the boats, parked through the merciless, freezing night winds, before they reached their destination on October 25th. On the Peverell ancestor's maps, the Styx lake they had found was actually a smaller version of what awaited them back in the Prime Material Plane. This was the sea channel between Albion and Ireland, and that miserably unwelcoming pile of rocks nearly in the middle of the placid waters was the mist-gate that gave access to the Isle of Man's northern tip. Once they passed the gateway, they would be inside the forgotten Mistgate Glen, and a single water-gate away from entering Gretna's Greens properly.

Wisely, the convoy decided to cross the lake in the evening, as their weather diviners had become alarmed at the signs of an impending blizzard. They were all suffering from the intense cold, some having to carry Blue-Bell flames in runic glass jars around their necks to be able to avoid injuries or illness from the cold climate. Nobody could tolerate this temperature and stay healthy any longer. With their physical and moral limits reached, the crews got news of what awaited at the gateway and decided to push forward.

As the shallow draft boats began to cross the small lake, just a handful of kilometers in diameter, they could now use telescopes or eye-enhancement spells to see the true size and nature of the minute island that was their exit point from this miserable chill. It wasn't an island at all, but a large building, obsolete in many ways, but built of solid stones, bricks and slate shingle roofs, with all the doors and window shutters having a cover of slate to protect them from erosion by the winds and wave-borne sprays of toxic Stygian water.

Upon arriving near it, the massive building was actually revealed to be three structures.

The biggest was rectangular and kept aloft on many stone piers, the masonry edifice climbing upwards in haphazard fashion, until it changed for wooden posts and plank walls, towards a non-symmetrical roof-line that revealed this part had been built in many phases, and without a guiding plan. The space beneath the main floor of this part was high enough to moor their boats directly without lowering the masts, and there were thick wooden docks with space to fit four of their boats in a 2 x 2 pattern. A solid masonry staircase embedded in one of the bigger pilings led up to the main level of the edifice, straight inside it seemed.

The second edifice was a rounded tower base that rose for about five storeys before changing to a structure of clay bricks and wood posts with a layer of coarse plaster to help resist the climate. All around the base of the tower, at lake-height, was a set of thick wooden walkways and docks, with wooden stairs to reach the doors, many floors up. At the rear of the walkways were a pair of enlarged platforms to serve as cargo buffer between the boats and the upper terraces. On the outer side of the tower's roof extended a fixed-height crane arm, the wooden beam worn by weather, with an old, frayed rope & tackle system still in place, dangling in the winds.

The rear edifice was essentially just a set of stone pilings keeping aloft a thick wooden deck some five storeys in the air. There were wooden docks at lake-height with masonry stairs jutting from the sides of some pilings to reach up to the elevated deck. From there, wooden ramps connected with the large stonework balcony that joined the rectangular and circular edifices together to form a sort of semi-covered terrace. At two levels above the terrace was a brickwork passage that linked the hodgepodge building and tower, fully walled and roofed, and seemingly twenty feet wide.

The refugees saw that there was space to park four boats under the jointing terrace in a 2 x 2 pattern, and space for six more under the huge rear platform in a 2 x 3 pattern. They set their craft as close together as possible while several house elves probed the building for dangers, diseases, structural cracks and other reasons they might want to avoid going inside. Since the reports kept coming back as "Nothing bad found" the crews agreed to shelter inside the inert pile of stones and bricks for the night, then decide what came next on the morrow.

x----------x

As soon as he set foot on the wooden dock next to the rounded tower, Harry felt the ancient Peverell 'Blood Compact' deliver him the information about the place. It was called the Gatekeeper's Market, and served their family exactly as the name suggested. It was the place to which all fishermen, wood-runners and professional herb gatherers came to dump their catch and get paid by the merchant in post. Several permanent longshoremen and armed sentries had kept this building in service for thousands of years before it was abandoned, about a thousand years ago when the Peverell Alliance began to decline catastrophically. Unfortunately, the genetic database also informed him that the building had been emptied and shuttered in an orderly fashion when the Lord Peverell of the day had decided to pull back from all external ventures.

The refugees had no troubles at working the crude, ancient locks on the doors, opening them to reveal frigid, musty air and not much else. Only the most basic furniture or chairs, tables, merchant counters and shelving stacks had been left behind. Anything small and portable had been removed during the withdrawal. The good news was that there were plenty of large hearths enclosed by cast iron stoves that would quickly heat the rooms and keep that warmth going as much as they needed it. There were even thick, open-top glass jars set in iron holders on the tops of the chair posts and in the middle of the tables, or along the trade counters. Somebody had obviously known that using Blue-Bell flames as both light and heat was the best trick in this environment, as demonstrated by the lack of chandeliers or wall sconces for torches or candles.

Taking the 'subtle' hint from the past, all those able to began to cast the blue flames into the foreseen pots as they walked through the rooms and corridors of the abandoned trading post. Soon, light, warmth and life flowed through the once derelict ruins. This was accompanied by the house-elves unpacking provisions to cook in the large iron ovens of the main assembly hall, the smells of their work embalming the refugees as they cleaned and placed furniture to their needs. Everybody knew full well that they would be stuck here for the night at least, but probably longer if the forecast blizzard got as bad as the first one.

No, it got worse. The convoy was stuck, parked at the gateway, for four solid days and nights while the storm raged outside, dumping close to seven feet of snow over the area surrounding the small lake. The refugees now understood why the roof-lines were pitched so steeply as heavy packs of snow slid off the slate shingles, dropping in the turgid waters below with stunning force and loud, nerve rattling splashes at all hours of day and night.

After a harrowing, stressful first night, the travelers got used to the extreme climate, taking their loose time to redo the packing of their provisions and tools, discarding trash safely, preparing more nutrient/warmth elixirs, and exploring the ancient ruin. Harry in particular took to walking around the obsolete edifice with Rehz and Dobby in the hopes that it would jog his genetic memories about the place and give him hints of what awaited them on the other side. In the evenings, the boy sat with the other kids in the great hall, telling stories of their younger days and how they got here despite all odds.

The refugees were relieved to find that the entire structure, though five millenia old and built in mismatched phases, had been crafted very sturdily. The users had apparently suffered the cold climes enough to use magical mortar to seal the exterior of all structures, thus keeping the dreaded Styx water and vapors outside. On the inside, they had used a finishing plaster that had minuscule reddish flecks that scintillated when you were less than three inches close, otherwise they were too small to see. That was because some genius nitwit had put powdered fire-Ember crystal in a solution of plaster, mage-clay dust and enchanting oil, then let it cure on the walls before brushing on a coat of Oil of Eternity to make it endure for centuries.

The walls were emitting a low temperature barrier because they had 'fire' Ember powder in the bloody plaster! Didn't the fools know that ANY miscast or lost electrical or fire spell could set the entire place ablaze like a roman candle? What the ever-loving fucks had the old guys been thinking about? Harry really didn't know if he should be proud of his ancestors for their ingenuity at solving the winter problem, or curse them for nine sorts of madness.

Most of the other refugees were barely interested past the first explanation as to why the place wasn't a freezer, and stopped listening after they knew how the plaster was made. Noobs!

x----------x

On October 30th, five days after arriving, the storms finally abated enough to be able to walk down to the boats to check them without freezing off important bits. The river boats were still all present and afloat, if caked in thick snowy blankets like small icebergs because the winds had blown sideways quite a few times, so the opened docks hadn't protected them from the climate at all.

It was but a few wiggles of elven fingers to sweep clean the boats, then get them ready for the next leg of the road. The refugees would wait another day to let the tail-end of the storm pass them, then they would brave the mist-gate anyways. They had to move one way or another, and they had to find a gentler climate than this white inferno if they wanted to set down roots to rebuild their community, or something resembling it.

So it was Sunday November 1st when the refugees packed their camp into the boats, finally ready to cross back into their home plane of existence. Everybody took a dose of nutrient & warmth elixir as a precaution, and wore clothing that completely covered every inch of skin to make certain they weren't sprayed by Stygian water or mist as they crossed the gateway. The only creature immune to the effects in the entire group was Rehz Ib Fettach and he had no idea why his species was unaffected by the magics in the liquid. It did however explain why his breath weapon gas worked the way it did.

The position of the mist-gate was rather simple; it was bracketed by the two main structures of the edifice. A series of stones carved with scriptworkes had been cemented in the walls and ceiling of the aperture, allowing to always open the gate at the same spot, oriented in the same direction. The size of the buildings and wooden docks served as gauges to determine if a boat could pass or not through the fixed dimensions of the portal's mouth.

Harry followed the simple ritual that was revealed to him by his genetic memories, while also explaining to everybody how it was done. The person wanting to pass the gate only had to be a lawful wearer of a Peverell Family, House or Alliance sigil ring, to which they needed to Tithe a full ounce of blood to give the enchanted portico its Power. There were no prayers or spells to chant, no exotic components, just put some blood on the ring and touch the appropriate stone on the side of the building, like slotting an oiled key into a rusty lock, then turn left to open the door panel.

The thrumming of Power building up was so sudden that it surprised everybody, even if they were expecting it. The sheer strength and aura let loose by the enacted enchantments made some of the more magically sensitive swoon as if they had gotten heat stroke in a desert. The gate materialized in an explosive burst of lead-gray mist, stench of ozone and blue lightning arcs that zapped along the surface of the lake, shattering ice floes and flotsam as they connected. Then the mists moved aside ponderously, clearing a path that was exactly thirty feet wide by thirty feet high in the air, with five feet of depth beneath the surface as boat keel allowance. The Peverell had configured their gateway exactly to the specifications of their shallow river boats, thus insuring that any invaders with bigger, deeper keels wouldn't be able to follow them home.

The boats began to pass through, with Harry in the first hull, just in case some sort of automated defense awaited on the other side. Dobby had told them that the Peverell had made fortifications in each of their Glens, but small ones that could only fight for less than a week. The tactic chosen had been to flee any enemy who actually managed to find and penetrate the Glens, not fight them to the death. The environmental pockets were never meant to be citadels or military camps, so any enemy force that managed to find them and breach the Mythal Shields had to be too strong to resist right from the onset. The small castles were designed to repel brigands and river beasts, not national armies or church crusaders.

{ HP } --- { The Mistgate Glen } --- { HP }

In an event that was seen as blessed by everyone, the entire convoy of ten boats passed through the Styx Gate unhindered. None of the humans, elves, familiars or livestock had been lost, except those animals planned to be used as food and crafting materials. It was a bloody miracle that none of them lost limbs or got a lung disease from that blasted winter climate. After that, the storm tossed waters of the Irish Sea off the picturesque Point of Ayre were most welcome, and almost an easy sail. The Mistgate's archway on the Earth side was built far differently than on the Styx River side.

The gateway was still set fixedly inside the arch of a building's segments, but this edifice was much younger and built along a guiding plan that had the hallmarks of an experienced architect. The structure was a huge central rectangular shape, some 100' wide by 300' long and 7 storeys high, with a rounded barrel roof, several round turrets, and two rectangular balconies that were set to for a 90 degree angle perspective with each other. The building's length was aimed straight out towards the Irish Sea, offering its thin side to the shoreline to which it connected by an armored and roofed masonry bridge that had a miniature stone gate-keep on the beach.

A large, heavily built and reinforced, roofed passageway projected a hundred feet outwards from the middle of the right long-side of the building, ending at a 30 foot diameter round tower with steep conical roof. There was an overhanging covered balcony on the outer side of the turret's flank to give a defensive view of the beach approach from that side. This segment of the edifice was the arch of the Styx gateway, and the convoy boats were emerging from this, oriented in direction of the open sea as designed to do.

The thinner roofed passageway that projected a hundred feet from the front-side of the building was actually set off-center, completely on the left of the façade. It started at a 30' large tower directly attached to the main edifice, followed over a masonry archway and abutted upon a rounded masonry column that was designed to break ice floes and resist the waves. he balcony was off-set so as to leave space for a low masonry pier and stairs that allowed boats to move people or small parcels quickly as they passed by the façade. The outward extremity of the passage had no defensive tower, only an open balcony walkway on its entire length that served as bowman gallery. Under this masonry arch was the fixed water-gate that would give access deeper into the network of Gretna's Blessed Green Glens.

As the shallow-draft boats fought the turbulent Irish Sea currents to move away from the edifice and Styx gate aperture, they began to have a better perspective of the shoreline. As promised, there were several dozen very old, sometimes primitive, ruined buildings and monuments that dotted the wintry, windswept landscape of harsh stones and crags.

A bit to the right was a medieval stonework base with an obvious boat-ramp and two asymmetrical Renaissance wooden edifices, one on each side of the ramp to help balance the weight of the boat that was being winched out of the water for repairs.

A bit further right was a very old and badly kept set of wooden piers, docks and ladders with several tall masts and rigging lodged between to mismatched buildings. An old wooden signboard still showed enough paint to depict a whale with a harpoon in its head.

On the left of the gateway hub was a massive Renaissance era structure made primarily of thick oak wood beams, girders and planks, with angled purplish slate roofs. The main body was about a hundred feet wide by some sixty feet deep and... probably... six storeys. It was hard to tell given the weird asymmetrical projections on the front, and left side, and the fact that the design didn't have windows placed in geometric patterns to mark levels. The good thing though was the big wooden board over the large front door of the main terrace; the ancient symbol for the Guild of Mariners, ship crewmen and longshoremen. That was an old warehouse with offices and trading post, plus a small bistro. All abandoned for close to a millenia of course, but between the gate hub's keep and this commercial structure, they could easily lodge their 114 people safely.

x----------x

Harry gestured with his Battlestaff, the spirit flames making a practical beacon to see in the dreary late fall, not that bright of a daytime. The rudder-men in the boats got the signal and made for the left of the gate hub, aiming to beach their boats near the guild warehouse. They would make a base camp and cache some supplies, tools and weapons here before going further back inland.

As they were, nobody had seen them arrive or land ashore as the entire zone was under an incredibly powerful Mythal Shield that felt suffocating on first contact. Even the least magically sensible of their group had needed several minutes to adapt to the presence of the dense magical fields before getting back to full mobility and awareness. For now at least, the Mistgate Glen was tolerating them as ordinary travelers passing through. For them to receive a more permanent welcome would necessitate Harry finding the central keystone of the Glen to give it blood and sit himself as the reigning Peverell Lord, then delegating access and movement rights to all others who had oathed to his Alliance.

Rehz Ib Fettach floated at a hundred feet in the air above Harry's head as the boats made contact with the crushed gravel and coarse sand of the artificially made beach, seeing two scores of six feet high stone monoliths emerging blithely from the sand and freezing surf, the glowing runes covering their four sides telling how the beach was still intact to receive boats after centuries of abandonment. At the back-end of the deep beach strip were another row of carved stone monoliths, a dozen feet high with a stone bowl at the top. Each was covered in glowing runes on its four sides, with glowing blue-white spirit flames dancing lazily in the sconce.

Spirit flames galore. Yeppp, they were in Peverell country now!

Without any problems but with much effort and a few elvish spells, all ten shallow boats managed to get safely to the beach and tie-off to the large monoliths, using the stone hooks carved into their flanks for just that purpose. After that, the crews worked together as they had in the past to climb the ancient, rickety stone stairs up to the open terrace and into the main hall of the guild building for the assembly discussion needed to decide what the next step was.

The process of quickly opening chimney flues, windows and doors, cleaning and refreshing then feeding the hearths with cheery wood fires was getting to be an ingrained habit by now. Even spreading runic glass jars with Blue-Bell flames on the tables and counters was instinctive, after the harsh freeze of the Styx zone they had endured. The group of refugees had become so efficient at moving themselves from place to place that they were all set for the group talk by the time that morning tea was ringing in people's pocket watches or 'tempus' charms.

x----------x

The central warehouse space had been cleared of empty crates or trash and set up with quickly unshrunk furnishings the refugees had brought with them. All 114 humans and elves plus familiars gathered served themselves warm food and piping hot tea that were more than welcome after yet another exposure to harsh winter winds over open waters.

Harry sat with the group of people who were seen in the convoy as the leaders of their movement, not only because of his name and the old falsified fame Dumbledore had manufactured for him, but because the boy was the genuine holder-of-rights in this land. That had been somewhat in doubt until this morning, when he opened the Stygian passage to return back to Earth, and British territory. Only Peverell Blood could trigger the gates and wards, and Harry Potter was the only Peverell alive this day. That made him THE leader in the group, regardless of whichever Title, Name, Rank, Style, or Posting he had held before they fled.

The discussion wasn't so much a debate of what comes next as it was just letting off steam and thanking each other for helping them to return to Earth safe and sound, if sorely tried. The trip hadn't been a walk in the park, but at least the zone was devoid enough of large lifeforms that they had not been forced into yet another fight for their right to exist. Although, if you talked to some of the rangers and farmers, having a bit more game animals would have helped to keep meat on their bones. They just didn't know enough about the environment and the edibility of things to permit eating too many of the native species given the risks of Stygian water, or if it transferred through whatever drank it before being butchered.

The necessities of the group were that they had to rebuild their provisions before going any further. Nobody had anticipated the harshness of the winter the Styx imposed on them, or the lack of edibles they had to compose with. If the climate had been more towards rain, they could have harvested plants and done tests to determine what was safe to consume for humans, elves or livestock. Thank Mystra for shrinking charms, as that was how they saved their trip towards safety because dimensional trunks couldn't make the journey.

Now, they were back on Earth, in an environment that several of their members had actually visited or worked in before. They finally had an advantage given to their group, after suffering through so much bitch-crap for more than a month when the initial estimates had been two weeks to reach where they were sitting.

One of the few benefits of their return was that they could unpack the portable radio and television sets that had been powered down when they discovered that Roderick Bode was trying to scan for their signals to target them. After more than a month on the run without a peep, it should be safe to light up the devices, not to mention that they had no other source of information on the outside world. Also, at this point, nobody knew if the ancient Mythal Shields would let the free-wave signals of modern communications pass or accidentally block them.

The group's TV sets were placed around the warehouse floor to make clusters so that people could watch the images without jostling for position. Each set got the added benefit of a charm used in government conferences to enlarge the pictures from reports or pensieves so that large tables all got a clear picture to look at. This meant that soon there were seven 10' wide bubbles of animated imagery floating above the heads of the crowd, to let them all see easily. A simple, good old 'sonorus' on the speakers did the job for sound projection. All that was left was to tune into a channel and put all the sets on the same to have the same information instead of cacophony or conflicting views.

The best guesses turned out to be bad. The venerable Wizarding Wireless was inoperative, so were most of the public radio towers or TV studios in Britain and Ireland. They got lucky with a local Isle of Man private studio that was broadcasting the signal of USA's company CNN for free to its auditors since it no longer had any resources to get news any other way.

The world had Fallen and could not get up for hundreds of years to come.

At the death of Elizabeth II from religious fanatics on September 28th, the British military high command had given the order to target the retched curs who had ordered and financed the assassination of the nation's last monarch, pushing the country into chaos.

On October 7th of 1992, a series of 12 Polaris nuclear missiles launched by the Resolution-class nuclear submarine HMS Repulse impacted throughout the most heavily populated zones under the control of the White Council of Christian Wizardry and its associated sects. Strikes hit the newly raised Basilica Christu Papalis on the shores of the Panama Canal, as well as the capitals of Argentina, Brasil, Mexico, seven major cities in the southern USA, and Toronto in Canada. The strikes by HMS Repulse were followed by similar, non-declared, preemptive attacks by her four sister ships, hitting a total of 77 targets with megaton-range warheads, all over Africa, Arabia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean shorelines, Europa and Slavia. Rome, Mecca and Jerusalem were eradicated, as were Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Minsk and Moscow.

By dusk on October 8th of 1992, the majority of christian religious fanaticism and specist militancy had been crushed in nuclear fire of such almight that none of the world's navies or standing militaries even tried to retaliate against England. In fact, for many of the military commanders, this was a rare chance to extirpate religion and electoral politicking from their ranks to insure training, nominations, promotions and careers based solely on legality, science and honesty, unlike before. At least, the survivors of the nuclear hecatomb thought the had a chance to rebuild better, if they lived through the diseases, famines and monsters unleashed by the dozens of atomic blasts that had chaotized the Earth's already precarious ecology.

The military leaderships' decision was understandable when you get the crux of the facts they were dealing with. The very first Polaris-3 missile hit the just-made Basilica in Panama, killing for certain all four angels of Jesus, including the Celestial architect, Danael of Concord, all of the sect's Senior Council, and the postulants for positions in the new Permanent Inquisition. The very movement that had tried to spearhead the overthrow of civilian, science-based governance in favor of religion-based totalitarianism had been scorched off the planet's face by mere muggle inventions, and not a single one of those greatly exalted mook-mooks had seen it coming.

"RULE BRITANNIA" was imposed on the burning, radioactive ashes of those who had dared to try to bring low the British Empire of England, the colonies and Commonwealth, and nobody could question that anymore.

With hundreds of millions of ordinary civilians murdered by the religious delirium, to which were added the deaths from fires, exploding utilities, disease epidemics of various origins, magical beasts now roaming loose, and the sudden eradication of close to two billion fanatical worshipers of three dozen denominations in one blow...

Yeah, nobody wanted to be the moron to order a follow-up on those events.

After long, painful and contentious debates via telephone and Internet, the few leaders that each national military could put on the horn agreed that they had better stop while they still had a planet to argue about. Because right now, they didn't have much left and it was in such a bad shape that a good kick in the dirt from a toddler could make it crumble to pieces.

The refugees of the Peverell Alliance were left with tears rolling down their faces, and soon every sentient being had a bottle of alcohol, a pipe of deleterious herbs, or both, in hand as they sat with their glazed eyes looking emptily into nothingness.

Preview of chapter 4;

The entire world has collapsed; all that is left are ruins, pain and regrets.

The Earth is crying for help and succor, but nobody is answering because, you know, most of everybody is either dead, suicidal, diseased into incapacity, or too stone to care anymore.

Thankfully, most of Harry's few relatives and close friends are around him in this time of need, but will it be enough, and what will they do about the situation outside their Glens?

Just how long will the fabled Mythal Shields hold back the radiation and desperate scavengers?

What will the refugees of the Peverell Alliance have to do in order to stay alive?

What will the few national armies still plodding along do about the mess? And what will they decide about magic and the species that were revealed before the self-inflicted cataclysm?


	4. The consequences of Hubris

The author wishes to express thanks to anyone who may read this story and encourages them to leave reviews, comments or even flame it hard. As with any who try their hand at publicly expressing an idea or story concept, all feedback is important and welcome.  
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, the Torchlight games, nor any other sci-fi or fantasy series, movies, comics, cartoons or news items used in this fiction as they belong to the creators, broadcasters or publishers who put them out for consumption by the public.

THE RUINED PEOPLES

Fourth chapter: The consequences of Hubris

Winter 1992 – The Fall of Humanity from Grace

(Sigrid, 2017– Everybody Knows)

Sunday, November 1st of 1992  
Mistgate Glen  
Point of Ayre, Isle of Man, The Britannic Realms

Young Harry Jamieson, Lord of Houses Peverell, Black, Potter, and Evans, was sitting peacefully in the topmost floor of the gate-hub, looking at the night sky through the open door that gave unto a small wooden balcony, perched high above the frigid waters of the Irish Sea, on the façade of the building. Sitting in the deeply upholstered wingback chair that had once served the prefect of the mist-gate, the child gazed idly upon the rhythmic movements of the waves, strongly but calmly moving thousands of tons of water like a baby playing in a bathtub.

The empty natural seascape was a balm to his injured mind. He held loosely the tube of his antique copper nargileh in the left hand while his right hand rested inert atop the scaly back of Rehz Ib Fettach, who was snoring softly on his ventral couch near the boy. The nargileh's main element was situated on a small side table, smoke wafting gently from its upper tube, with a bottle of Ogden's Lordly Reserve, Truly Very Old, amber firewhiskey, and a small silver goblet besides. The child brought the ebony mouthpiece of the tube to his lips for a pull on the soothing vapors of tobacco, marijuana and hashish mixture, that was smoldering in the sconce of the water-pipe. After inhaling deeply, he set the tube in his lap to grasp the goblet of alcohol, sipping a small taste of the hard liquor then exhaling the customary belch of colored, flavored steam by the mouth. Closing his tired eyes, Harry set the goblet back on the table, wrapping his fingers around the pipe's tube, mostly by reflex rather than necessity. He had already smoked and drunk enough to be relaxed, his mind floating on the eddies of chemically induced restfulness.

The poor, beleaguered Earth had burned.

A total of 89 cities had been wiped off the map by megatonic blasts, scorching almost two billion religiously fanatical humans, plus nearly as many persons from other species, inside of a 24 hour window of action. This was added to the four hundred million magical entities that had been killed by the churches and pseudo-inquisitors in the month preceding the atomic strikes. Then you had to add all the thousands of animal and plant species that were simply eradicated out of existence when their ecosystems were burned, boiled, irradiated, or blown-out by pneumatic pressure wave, because they were too close to the exploding cities.

Mother Gaia usually employed wild fires and floods to cleanse itself of the parasites and diseases that ulcerated its placid existence. A few tornadoes and earthquakes could help that along, in those zones where particularly nasty critters were encroaching upon her capacity to tend the natural order in peace. But this time, all those methods had proven to be too little, and too late.

It had taken the unfettered, savage attitude of a species suffering the hubris of pretending to be evolved above and beyond the Natural Order of the Divines to commit a cleansing deep and harsh enough to be effective, this time around. Only humans could be so disjuncted from Reality and Truth as to think that the basic rules of ecology, environment and morality no longer bound them to the Living Realms, as they did all other species. In their demented run towards glorious domination of everything in sight, the inbred, incompetent and mostly useless, humans had committed those things that were Anathema to Magyck. They had dared to believe they stood above the Celestials and Divines, that the Order of Things was to bow at their feet in submissiveness, as they had enslaved other species, races and ethnic groups for thousands of years.

Mothers Gaia and Cosme had other ideas about the situation.

Like the old story of Icarus and the wax wings, humans had dared to walk outside their allotted place in life, trying to usurp that which was the province of the Celestials and Divinities, as per the decrees of Yggdrasil and the godly parliament of the Cynosure. There could be only one punishment for this perfidious depravity done by mankind against their creators.

To die in flaming miseries.

Cuz, yeah, a single, simple, way to die like burning just isn't nastiness enough to punish humanity properly, so there would have to be multiple horrors, pains and shames altogether.

Hence the 'miseries' with an 'S' at the end. For plural.

Cuz that's what humanity earned for itself.

Lots and lots of cruel, awful ways to suffer as they died off.

Opening his eyes to gaze at the Irish Sea's white crested waves, going to-and-fro without a care in the world, Harry Potter cried in private the tears that a leader of men could not let show in public, for fear of being denounced as weak, ineffective, or too childish for the job. Even though the Titles, Houses, Ranks, Styles and Positions were his by Magyck's will, there would still be a few stupids to challenge his rights or duties if they saw a chance, despite all that happened around them.

Humans were really that stupid, even in such times of collective ordeal.

Power Penultimate, politics and riches firstly, then survival. They all preferred to die, rather than be seen by their families or neighbors as weak or inferior to a small, novice child.

Well, if that was their desire, he would accommodate them easily, and use their corpses to fuel rituals or have Nightsoil to grow food in. Either way, Hades' will shall be done.

x----------x

The first night in Mistgate Glen had been calm for everybody. Even those with nightmares or too wired to sleep had found ways to appease their emotions, usually with a bottle or pipe, or both.

The adults were so preoccupied with trying to figure out what happened next, and what it meant for their positions in society, if society still existed at all, to care for what the kids were doing to stay calm and silent. In the few cases where an adult could have left his own moral uncertainties long enough to ask, the kids would have gladly shown wands and weapons to incite the person to walk away quietly. In this mess, all societal conventions and laws were in upheaval, everything in question, and nothing was certain or guaranteed anymore, let alone old hierarchies.

The only certitude the group of refugees had was that they owed their survival to the preparations of the Peverell Bloodline, and the current Alliance that Harry Potter had created. This did not create a magical life-debt, but it did establish young Harry Potter as a competent and capable leader who had brought his allies to safety while the world was burning. The reality of his actions and emotions in caring for others, that did in fact create a type of debt, because Harry had done the first part of his duties as Titled Lord and Peer of the Realms. He had moved to safety, lodged, fed and healed his followers, when nobody else had stepped forward, or even proposed to take up the responsibility for their safety.

For many adults, the night had been a harsh reminder that the twelve year old boy was IN DEEDS and in magic their Lord, and to go against him would actually trigger the Oath-Breaking penalties that the Alliance Treaty and contracts prescribed. Signing those documents in blood had been a good strategy on Harry's part, as the refugees were now completely bound to him, no matter what happened to the worlds around them. Opinions of ageism aside, unless they had a real fear about his logic, rationality or basic sanity, they were stuck with him as the main Boss of the team, and the setup of Lords and Ladies around him, including the other kids too.

Man, what a damned wake-up, this got to be!

{ HP } --- { Breakfast in the Mists } --- { HP }

Harry had used a few quick charms for personal hygiene to clean off the grime and sweat from the restless sleep of the passed night. He wore the same clothes as yesterday, but that was pretty much the common circumstance across the group. Even Narcissa Malfoy hadn't had the energy or psychological fortitude left to make the effort, despite having house-elves and clothes switching charms available. You knew you were in it bad, if the Black Sisters decided to leave pride and public appearances by the wayside to concentrate on more important things.

Thankfully, the elves were pushed by their innate imperative to serve and maintain the health of their families, regardless of wars or politics. The green-skinned beings slept in shifts to watch the two camps that had formed, in the guild warehouse and the mist-gate hub, and had kept food warm in the hearths all through the night. Sure, breakfast was a lot less impressive than the usual fare the refugees had eaten to date, but it was already done and warm, so it sufficed. Leftovers had the benefit of being known things, and each person already knew how much they would eat, if at all, and what to add or change to make it palatable.

The older humans were carefully silent at the sight of the bleary-eyed Harry Potter who walked through the camps with his Faerie Drake on a shoulder, thanking the elves for their services and touching base with the 'leaders' of their small community as he found them.

Soon enough, Harry found himself with an entourage who all congregated in the warehouse's main floor to eat a hot meal and drink enough tea to sober up from the last evening. The kids in the expedition gathered around a monumental hearth, serving themselves their own plates and cups after waving off several elves who volunteered to wait on them. The few, small movements needed to serve and eat helped the young persons to anchor themselves back into reality, into the basic, mundane world that they now needed to face-up to, if they wanted a chance at survival.

x----------x

Besides Harry were seated Neville, Hermione, Susan, Draco, Nymphadora, Luna Lovegood, Vilisia and Vesulia Ollivander, Daphne and Astoria Greengrass, Gregory and Cassandra Goyle, and finally Theodore Nott. The youngest was Astoria who was still a year away from Hogwarts age, and the oldest was Vilisia who was weeks away from celebrating 'Magisterium Ascendo' on her twenty-first birthday. The rest of the group were high-school aged or just above.

Nymmy took a cup of tea with both hands as if her life depended on it. Not that she was more British or snobby than the others, but that walk between the two buildings just after getting out of bed had been a freezing ordeal. It was November in a country that was very small, windswept, surrounded by open seas, and somewhat north of the tempered zones, so winter was pretty much upon this area already. In fact, there was a diffuse smattering of powdery white flakes drifting down from Heavens as far as the eye could see unaided.

Drats! More cold and snow. As if the Styx hadn't been enough for all of their tastes.

At least the flora and fauna were known quantities in this Plane of existence. They should be able to replenish their supplies for the next leg of the journey somewhat easily, unless the rest of the small Glen was warded too badly to be unlocked.

"Hey, cousin?" asked the teenaged metamorph, "When do you plan to find the keystone? We'll be needing to gather stuffs to refill our packs and prepare for the rest of the trip to Gretna's Green at some point soon." The group of kids snorted in amusement at the girl's "Aaaaah! Warm!" upon gulping half her cup before she even got an answer.

Harry shook his head in mirth as he methodically alternated between tea and jam basted toasted bread for his rather drab meal. Just watching Rehz at his side, chewing through a jerked sausage, made him queasy. Maybe he had exaggerated on the herbs, last evening. And he shouldn't have drunk booze on an empty stomach either. He would know better next time he got depressed.

Since he could feel his stomach clenching at the intake of solids, Harry knew that if he didn't finish his toast he would waste it or dump it in the wild grounds as fertilizer, so he raised a finger to indicate he would eat first and speak afterwards. With the last bites of the single toast slice safely washed down with a second cup of tea, the boy made himself at ease on the wooden chair to address the questions asked of him.

"It isn't a secret, you guys. I was planning on having an Alliance meeting, just after the meal. But, looking at the people's faces, I think we had better keep things as informal as possible for the coming days. At least until we all get our heads wrapped around the mess we inherited from the morons who are no longer here to help clean-up what they wrought."

Gazing into his third cup, the boy said "I want to find the ward keystone today, and one or two of the mana sources to make sure that the glen's defenses are fully powered to tough out what has been circling around the planet for the last three weeks." Looking around the young people, he asked glibly "Surely you remember that explosions create clouds of ash, sulfur, particles of metals and plastics, unburned chemicals, etc... Plus of course the radiation from 89 megatons of nuclear warheads detonating in the space of 24 hours, barely a few hundred miles apart in some places. The climatic wards that recycle the air and water will be sorely tested, and I need to shore them up as quickly as I can, if we don't want to glow like Underdark mushrooms."

Luna commented airily "What's wrong with glowing? As long as it doesn't affect your health, it could be practical. Think of all the empty buildings and virgin forest camps we've had in the last month. Glowing would have made exploring and night watch duties much easier."

Hermione face-palmed in despair while several kids mumbled that the weird girl had defended her point with valor. Then Rehz triggered a collective guffaw of laughter by saying "I like this girl. She sounds like she slept all night in a cloud of my breath-weapon gas, but she's doing it in style. And she's making it credible too. Not many can do that."

The faces on some of the Pureblood raised kids were priceless, and pensieve fodder if ever there was such a concept. This would make the list of fond memories for many of them. Luna for her part seemed quite tickled that the little dragonnet was approving of her sense of humor. She hadn't been serious, but it was a good tactic to see who would be mean or supportive and it had never failed her yet. To date, Harry and Neville were good, while Hermione was a maybe not, and the others hadn't expressed opinions firm enough to categorize. She would tag them later.

"If we could be serious here, for a minute," asked Draco in a put-upon tone of voice.

"Hades, I hope not! My god-father had been 'serious' and it did him no favors." replied Harry, without really thinking it through before it had gotten out.

Raising a hand to volunteer to the group, Neville playfully smacked Harry's left shoulder, saying in a disappointed tone "Bro, you need to work on the timing. And the delivery. And the content too. Cuz honestly, changing that wouldn't hurt." Then, in a bratty manner, the boy ended "Except for those pesky details, everything else was okay. You're good to go."

Ignoring the nervous laughter from the crowd, Harry slowly and demonstratively raised a middle finger towards his sibling, adding a small flourish with his other hand for emphasis. The kids tittered a bit more before things calmed down. All of them had a lot of nervous energy accumulated from the dreary, dangerous trip in the Styx demi-plane, and most hadn't finished decompressing or destressing from the harrowing survival test before getting hit with a nuclear winter & fallout scenario. While the jokes were childish or in poor taste, nobody could honestly say they hadn't expected it to happen.

After a few minutes to calm down and refresh tea cups or plates of solid food, Harry took a breath to steady himself for the explanation to what he wanted done. "We need to resupply, but we also need to get warm and steady again. That trip through the Styx was way worse than I thought it would be. Besides a basic outline of the topography, we didn't have climatic factum to plan with, and the maps were a thousand years out of date. We were basically exploring as if we were the first to pass through the area. But the problem is that this first leg of travel drained our morale and resilience far more than I had anticipated."

Taking a sip of his fourth cup, the child admitted in low whispers, "Even I am not looking forward to plodding through more damned snow and ice. And Britain's winter season is officially begun. Think about it; if we were in Hogwarts, we'd have nearly two feet of snow on the ground already."

Speaking in a normal level, Harry declared firmly "We will be harboring here, in the Mistgate Glen, until the situation changes to such a degree that we are forced to move or have found better opportunities elsewhere. In the immediate, we need a steady supply of foodstuffs. There used to be four-seasons farming, horticulture and fishing in this village. We just need to build one or two carrack, maybe caravel sized, boats to use the Irish Sea properly as food source. Plus, at that size we could build them with a steam power-plant for the propellers, the hydraulics that move the sail masts, and recharging a few batteries for the radio, TV and computer in the wheelhouse. Make the setup real modern but also cozy and livable for the guys who will be going out there."

Theo Nott wondered aloud "Are you certain that it will be safe to sail the open sea channel, like that, in this kind of war situation? Won't the British navy, at the least, take us for enemy spies? Or try to eradicate us because of magic or our species?"

It was Neville who answered with a shrug; "No, he doesn't know. And none of the adults do either, even if they claim the contrary. The plain truth is that this bordello is so damned chaotic that even a professional divinator wouldn't see anything further than his eyeballs. But our options are to start living in the hopes of better chances and opportunities coming, or lying down in despair until Death welcomes us. Now, I don't know about you, Nott, but if the only confirmed Hadean cleric in the group says to get off my ass and do stuff, then I'm pretty sure that means that Death ain't the option to aim for today."

A collective snort of amusement answered the pudgy blond's joke, especially given how accurate it happened to be. Vesulia Ollivander interjected "I'm all for action and setting up our camp for better homesteading conditions. However, where do we find the blueprints or tools to build boats with anything more complex than wooden hulls and cloth sails? Even just the ten river boats we crafted for getting here were a drain on our magicks and skills, not to mention the actual sailing part which none of us had ever done."

Luna quipped playfully "Englishmen, born on an island, but never sailed a day in their lives! Oh, the shame of such humanity! Surely it must be redressed hencewith!" in a faux-snob tone.

Nymmy smirked at the younger girl, clinking her tea cup against hers in approval while the rest of the group groaned in misery at the far too easy jest.

Harry, being the pessimistic jerk that he was, just had to add "Whelp, it isn't like Brits are one or two shames short of a full depravity, ain't it? After them riots and burning witches at the stake in the 20th century, they sure don't seem like shame and humiliation are driving forces anymore."

Nobody had any desire to touch that piece of carrion with a stick, so it laid flat where it fell.

"Ahem, anyways," Harry pursued through the uneasy silence, "We saw a shipyard on the right side of the gate hub. I have no idea if it's the only one in the village, nor what is the biggest size of hull it can permit to get built. However, for plans and tools, it should be the first place to look, followed by any central library or archives. This was after all a merchant hamlet, and fixing the boats of their customers or visitors would have been prime business, back in the day."

Hermione suggested "Besides, several of us brought some computers with antennae, so we can try to link remotely with the muggle Internet. There is bound to be some basic blueprints of antique ships from the Renaissance or Steam Age in the online encyclopedias. Otherwise, we take one of the river boats just out of the Mythal Shield to let somebody teleport to a museum or university in a place like Manchester, to search the solid archives for plans and knowledge. Maybe also for food, or tools we're missing."

Susan approved, adding "If we send a fishing boat out of the Mythal Shield, we can let a team of elves ride along to go check on our properties and friends, to exchange messages and materials that they would scan for traps or tracers before coming back. This would allow us to not be so tightly enclaved in this hamlet, as if we were stuck in an empty Azkaban, in the North Sea."

Harry nodded at the ideas, as they were all valid concerns, and options that would not only be easy to enact but also have directly visible positive results on the morale of the entire group. He had to admit to himself that not hearing from Kreacher for a month weighed on his conscience to some degree that he had not anticipated.

Draining the rest of his tea, Harry motioned Rehz to move to his shoulder so he could shrink the ventral couch and send it back to his vest pocket for the day. "Alright people, I'll find the town center or temple, wherever they placed the ward keystone, and you get started on scrounging for edibles and boat building equipments. Now, be advised that Dobby said that dimensional magicks could not pass the Mythal barrier, not that the Peverell were incapable of making some if they were already inside the Glens. So, be alert for hidden or forgotten, shrunken trunks or boxes, as well as storage seals or holding-type bags and pouches. Also, if they had a guild for mariners, sailors and longshoremen, then they could have warded rooms or freezers spread around town to handle that sort of commercial traffic of people and goods. So look around, even if you feel like you're just playing tourist for the day. We need it done, one way or another."

Winter 1992 – The Queen is dead! Long live the Queen!

(Thomas Arne, 1740 - Rule Britannia)

Monday, November 2nd of 1992  
Balmoral Castle  
Royal Deeside, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, The Britannic Realms

Everybody on Earth knew for a fact that Elizabeth II of House Windsor, Queen of England, Scotland, North Ireland and her many other Realms, colonies and Commonwealth had died a most calumnious death at the hands of a christian fanatic on September 28th of 1992. Hence, you might be surprised to see the old gal marching with aplomb and dignity around the storied halls and chambers of the venerable Balmoral royal estate, as her ancestors had done since queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, had bought the first lot in 1848.

She looked rather hale and hearty, for a mutilated corpse that was drug to the street, hung to the wires between two telephone poles then set ablaze with lamp oil by rioting fanatics and enemy soldiers that had teleported ad hoc into Dover Castle to assassinate her most foully.

She wore the small day crown and the thick red armored battle robes of the royal office, with a short two-edged sword of High Elven crafted mithril on her belt, and the ancient relic 'Holy Scepter of Albion' in her right hand. She marched down from the private monarchic apartment in the main tower to find the War Cabinet in the large lounge where they had set-up their computers and magical crystal panels. They were actively managing the fight to take back Britain from the thronging hordes of religious or foreign barbarians that had suddenly manifested inside their borders, like a surprise winter squall over the North Sea.

"My Lord Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Oswald, what is the status of my Realms?" the elder woman asked imperiously, not giving an inkling of the depraved fatality she had endured mere weeks before.

Saluting smartly, the elder gentleman replied in firm, calm tones, "All is as was predicted by our analysts, upon your Majesty's decision to enact a nuclear stratagem to counter the fulgurant progression of the terrorist sect, and its paid servants. The very public and heavily mediatized devastation of the Basilica Christu Papalis and their redoubt in Argentina struck a deep blow indeed, but the confirmed deaths of the four Denarian angels is what sealed the deal. The follow-up strikes across christendom, including Rome, cleaned-up nicely. From then on, all of their subaltern sects or salaried minions have been running around like so many headless chickens trying to flee the butcher's second chop."

The elderly 5-star admiral adjusted the front of his military suit jacket, giving further details to his very much living monarch; "The city of London is still beset by knaves and vagabonds of all ill-bred sorts, Majesty. The brigands are still pillaging and burning, but in far smaller numbers than a month ago, when magic was revealed. We estimate that we shall be ready to forcibly take the town and all its districts come Thursday of this week, at the fall of night. The nocturnal sights on the helmets and vehicles of our men will give them a determining advantage over the petty thieves and barbarians still afield. Once we have cleared the public avenues of rabble, we can have the conclave of divinators search for traitors and spies for the hunting teams to expose."

Nodding regally, the British sovereign clarified "Therefore, by our best estimates, we should have a permanent defensive perimeter around our capital by Thursday evening at the latest, and control of the streets by Friday evening at best case. The strategists supposed that control would take until Sunday night at the earliest to be achieved, if no professional soldiers from the enemy armies remained inside the municipal limits. Why is your estimate so much more optimistic?"

Making a small, victorious smirk, the old man replied "Because hundreds of gormless fools found out the location of several magical Noble Houses inside London. They have thronged towards the properties to challenge the wards and physical defenses in the name of their dead god, or the non-existing ones. They only received the full brunt of warfare or siege-wards for their efforts, leaving precious few professional soldiers from the enemy's portkeyed minions to deal with by now. Our analysts estimate that the White Council has lost some two thousand Jesuit exorcists, varied curse-breakers, warlocks and lay inquisitors, along three thousand more locally based mundane fanatics. All since the start of this debacle, just by those magical Houses hidden around London. Many more thousands of their soldiers, trained cultists or paid mercs, have died in similar fashion all over the United Kingdom as they tried to unseat the House of Lords by killing the members' Families. That does indeed change the lay of the land in the favor of our marines and infantry."

Exhaling a deep breath through the nose in a manner far too controlled and and ladylike to be called either a sigh or snort, the queen decreed "Very well, Fleet Admiral. You may continue as planned whilst I visit our erstwhile allies in the subterranean annex, beneath the greenhouses."

Admiral Sir Oswald, First Sea Lord of Britain, kept a studiously neutral face at the mention of their supposed allies. Finding the beings had been the sort of cataclysmic event that nations are ended by. The only reason he wasn't panicking to the point of ordering an atomic strike on Balmoral to save humanity was that the beings were already loyal to England and had maintained ancestral blood oaths to the crown for nigh on three millenia. Still, they were not only foreigners but completely alien to humanity and Earth's life-forms. How they could trust them was beyond him to understand, yet the proof of their usefulness stood before him.

They had kept the Royal Family alive.

Surely that was enough to give some blokes a chance?

Maybe.

Time would tell just how right or deluded they all were to trust the motivations of such entities.

{ HP } --- { The ancient sages of Britain } --- { HP }

Queen Elizabeth II walked slowly, in the decorative and ceremonial manner that befit her station and exalted title in life. She carefully gazed at the furniture and wall hangings as she marched through the manor, almost wanting a traitor to emerge so that she could test the legendary might of the 'Holy Scepter' upon their unworthy carcass. The relic was vibrating in her grasp at the thought that criminals, traitors and enemy soldiers were still traipsing around the Realms without getting their due castigations for such churlishly abominable behaviors.

The older woman walked out of the side doors normally reserved for staff, aiming for the old greenhouses that had been built nearly a century ago, at the behest of queen Victoria. While they did serve to produce food and medicinal herbs all year long, the true reason for the construction had been that they needed something with life-force in it to hide the magical and spiritual signatures of those beings that would occasionally visit Her Majesty to offer counsel and guidance for the conduct of the magical portions of the Realms.

Entering the right-hand door of the stone and glass greenhouses, the queen turned leftward, right into the medium sized, unisex lavatory that served as separation between the central portion and the right side wing of the horticulture building. Without pause, the monarch ignored the three stalls and the counter with three sinks, going for the door to the machinery closet. Entering the small space that was barely 7 x7 feet, she tapped her sigil ring on three dull scratches that had been made in the old cast iron plumbing that fed water to the washroom facilities and the rest of the building. Grabbing strongly the pipe with the now glowing runes, she was teleported quite smoothly and silently, from the wintry surface down several hundred feet into the solid Scottish bedrock.

The door besides her automatically opened without sound, but thin sheets of colored light played in the opening, visibly indicating powerful wards and defensive shields. The queen walked through the salubrity, cleansing, un-parasite, cure disease and free-mind wards without pause, knowing the benefits of their effects upon her person at each visit.

Walking down the drab gray corridor, the falls of her solid boot soles echoed off the cut and dressed granite blocks in forlorn rhythm. No light aided her march but what lambent glow came from myriads of small glyphs and figures deeply engraved in each stone block laid in the floors, walls and ceilings. The temperature in this underground realm was chill enough to make her breath come out in white vapor clouds that wafted around her head mysteriously, but it was still warmer than upside, where snow was falling in earnest.

Finally, the human queen arrived at a pair of tall double doors, the two panels being composed of runed granite slabs so hard that a tank's cannon shell would bounce off. The totally solid and opaque portal valves gave no indication of what mysteries, or almight, may dwell behind them.

There were no sentries or beasts to guard the doorway, nor anything else inside this portion of the complex. In the century it had existed, only the reigning monarch of the land had ever set foot inside since it had been closed up, at the end of construction. Then again, the building was utterly empty unless the three great sages were in attendance, which they only did when the monarch summoned them for audience.

The twin panels moved aside silently, giving no indication to their thickness or weight as no grinding or mechanism was heard to give insights. The room beyond was vast and round, three hundred feet in diameter and nearly five hundred in height, shaped like a chicken egg. It had some 36 structural half-columns all around the exterior wall, and a ten foot wide stonework coursive balcony at the height of the door where the queen entered, some 150 feet above the bowl-shaped floor. A free floating, ten foot wide stonework walkway with three foot high cast iron hand-rails formed a cross that linked the entry door with three others on the farther sides of the ovoid chamber. In the middle of the large room, the four walkways united to form a thirty foot wide circular platform upon which visitors could stand or sit as needed. From afar, you could see the vague shapes of furnishings already positioned in this meeting place.

And therein, floating indolently amongst the black and purple ethers that dimmed and diffused the ghostly bluish lights from the wall glyphs, placidly drifting on eddies of eerie Powers as only beings of galactic wisdom could contemplate, were the three Grell from the Welsh Ministry.

{ HP } --- { The Brain-Trust of Britain } --- { HP }

Elizabeth II of House Windsor entered the vast void of carved stones and eldritch symbols, well aware that she owed these inhuman floating entities the lives of each member of the Royal House of Windsor. Her husband, her sons and daughters-in-law, her grandchildren and great-nephews, all of them were alive today because of the Grell giving them assistance.

The solution had been simple, really.

Each Grell had a specialty in its training, but none were mechanically inclined. Their species had always developed skills in psionics, illusions, and the organically based forms of alchemy and transmutation. So the three beings had quickly prepared a living clone of each member of Elizabeth II's known kindred, then implanted them with a hybrid psionic/illusion beacon that would attract all enemies and traitors from up to a thousand miles away. Then these fully autonomous clones were placed in a military base that was considered valuable, but more expendable than where Britannia would hide her House. She planned to hide in Balmoral Castle, well away from easy roads or airports, and right atop one of the Grell's many nests in Britain. That left Dover Castle and its Joint Task Force base as the sacrificial decoy.

On the evening of October 28th, several hundred magically transported and empowered enemy soldiers forced their way into the royal apartments of Dover, after England had been betrayed by self-radicalized christian devotees bewitched by the Denarian sect's pretty speeches. The defenders were overwhelmed, the clones were found and killed gruesomely, and the whole planet thought that it was the end of the United Kingdom of Britain.

In the meanwhile, hidden by the psychic veils of the Grell, Elizabeth and her family had witnessed the attacks and results, then immediately plotted a terrifying riposte that nobody should have ever tried to follow or respond against. The Fallen Denarian christian angels certainly could not answer as they were all dead and cremated, but some few morons of momentous depravity had indeed tried to follow on the 89 British atomic strikes. The Chinese Republic's Revolutionary Army had tried to nuke multiple targets in the Britannic Realms and Commonwealth, especially Albion, Scotland, America and Canada.

But the missiles had suddenly... 'un-exploded' themselves...

The missiles had seemed to go right back into their launchers, and said systems had seemed to backtrack into storage position.

The MI-6 wiretaps out of Hong-Kong all seemed to indicate that the attacks had been ordered, launched, and then -miraculously- been countermanded with such authority that the vehicles had gone back to their bases and the orders were wiped from the army comms entirely.

None of Elizabeth II's soldiers or spies had yet explained HOW that sort of thing could happen, hence she was visiting again the ancestral allies of the English crown, since the Isles formed a country, which was a lot sooner than anybody knew about.

"Gentlemen," Dame Britannia addressed the floating cerebrum, much to their amusement as they were sexless and self-reproducing. "Our military forces and espionage networks are still not able to find how or why all appearances demonstrate that a Chinese nuclear attack occurred on multiple targets of our Realms and Allies, yet no damages resulted. Have your august conclave divined the answers to this pressing matter?"

Answering with the assurance and snobbishness that befits beings of such age and Divine might of magicks and wisdom, the Grell leader spoke: "Greater, elder magicks were used. As for the purposes, well, that should be obvious even to mortal eyes. Some paranoid idiots in China's armed forces panicked and launched an illegal, non-permitted attack across the planet. The entity in charge of the nation decided to stop wasting his time and did... something... to correct the mistake and bind the weapons to his will so it not happen again. The details beyond that are fuzzy, even to us."

The Grell in the left rear grumbled in a loud mind voice "That decrepit old fossil in Beijing just doesn't let information out of his crypt easily. He's been talking to the Gnomes in Switzerland again. Geopolitics inspired by the secrecy rules of bankers. What is the world coming to? The next thing you know, the armed services won't be sieves anymore, and even mind-rape of enemy spies won't give out information."

The Grell on the right rear assented blithely "Put us out of a job, they will, those bloody little wankers. After all we invested in their banks and commerce over the centuries. No gratefulness anymore, no matter where you look."

Mulling these revelations, the queen asked for confirmations on the salient points; "Therefore, the Living Angels of Jesus are as dead as their god, their specific Denarian sect has finally been eradicated from Earth, christians no longer represent a credible organized threat, and the Chinese have gotten a hold of their collective spine to insure nobody shoots anybody yet." Making a vague gesture of her free hand, the monarch queried impatiently "Is there anything else?"

The Grell leader gave the detail "The house-elves that used to live in the zones targeted by our navy's nuclear attacks were warned sixty seconds before the missiles impacted. As such, several hundred of the green-skinned servants have managed to save the youngest children of the houses where they lived. We sent them the mental compulsion to only bother with children under the age of 15, and to teleport themselves to the upper northern zones of Canada, to be well out of the blast radius of all affected zones. We have since then given the elves mental blueprints of simplistic dwellings capable of toughing out the strength of the coming winter climate, and how to create tempered greenhouses and livestock barns to match. That side-project should have allowed to save a little over 6,000 magical children, now immigrants to your Commonwealth."

Queen Elizabeth II nodded, well pleased with the news. Having saved that many children from the biggest nation that was member of the British Commonwealth since its foundation would insure that England remained the second biggest and best equipped magical power on Earth after China. While very few things were known about the Qin Empire, one piece of datum that had floated for centuries was that they had over 1,000,000 living magical humans, plus eight times that many from mixed species. Even if all the goblins, elves, hobbits, orcs, ogres, trolls and others on British soil were tabulated, it was doubtful that they amounted to something near.

The Grell at the right rear aimed a barbed tentacle towards the wingback chair and serving cart on the stone platform, mere feet away from the visiting noblewoman. "We have Assam today, and it has just finished steeping with some cardamom and ginger. Would you care to stay for a chat? We get so few visitors in our humble abode. It's almost like we're uncivilized or scary, or something..."

Gazing upon the cart curiously, the human ruler blinked her eyes in surprise at what she beheld on the top tier. "Is that a portable radio? With a television in it? What an odd idea. It would be practical for picnicking, I dare say, at least to learn the coming weather. And the rugby scores, like the menfolk would worry of."

The snotty Grell declared haughtily "We watch the news from around the world, and the set also gets the wizarding channels, due to our little crystal receiver. In fact, it should be time for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's midnight talk-show on global affairs. They are several hours behind us, in the time zones."

Sighing loudly, the queen replied airily "Oh, very well. You forced me into it. Besides, it's either this or be cooped up in the top of the manor's blasted tower, like a doll on a shelf, because everybody is afraid I'll get killed (-again-) or injure myself just by existing. In such circumstances, I would rather your company. Would you have orange marmalade, for the scones, please?"

Taking her place in the plush chair, the queen was served quite properly by the Grell through telepathic manipulations and a few deft movements of tentacles. Soon, the television was lit and the CBC's late night talk-show about the state of the country, the Commonwealth and Earth was starting. Tonight's subject was the rather obvious fact that George H. W. Bush was going to lose his bid for presidential reelection in the USA at the end of November, and that he would be lucky to not get court-martialed for treason against the country. The guest speakers discussed what could the Canadian population expect from Bill Clinton once he held office, some arguing that the USA's currently half-destroyed geography, population basin and economics could not be predicted nor trusted. In fact, at this point, several pundits were arguing that the USA would not even bother with an election as they had far bigger problems to handle and put their resources in. During the second hour of the show, climatology experts discussed the unfolding nuclear winter and what the federal government was doing to fight the onset of a new Glacial Age upon the country. They would be amongst the worse hit because Canada was already so far up north and regular winter had begun at the same time.

Armed with scone and tea, the queen thought to herself that the two hours were well spent in good company, and were far more useful that way, than if she had been cooped up like a decoration inside an aquarium. "Long live Britannia, indeed, bitches!"

The snobby Grell declared "Our own nation should be able to pass through this cataclysm with some success, even though there will be deaths and diseases happening. The fact that you had taken-up the reigns of the national sovereignty wards a few months before the conflagrations will help keep the Isles' climate stable. It will also repel some of the radiation, but much of the sullied water and ash borne in the air will pass through. There will be some level of contamination and glaciation in England and the Realms, if nothing further is done to stop it."

Queen Elizabeth II wondered aloud, "Don't we have a geological and climatic problem at Hogwarts to take care of? Something about the Ley Lines being polluted and spreading? Would it be possible to enact a remedy for that situation that would also help with stabilizing the climate and atmosphere around the entirety of the United Kingdom?"

The Grell at the rear left clicked two chitinous tentacle tips together as he thought through that question. He was their expert alchemist and crafter, so it was his problem to solve. "Yes, we could use a solution that the Illithid have employed on a few barren worlds, when they wished to place a military or resource extraction colony."

Waving his tentacles in spiral patterns, the Grell made a twenty foot wide image float in the air between the four entities to display his thoughts. The picture was a map with brown dirt, blue water, green Ley Lines and yellow lines for the national borders. "Here is the entirety of the United Kingdom, from the Channel Islands in the south, up to the highest Shetland Isles in the north, with all of Ireland and the Isle of Man in the middle."

A sweep of spiky tentacle had several red dots appear over the map. "And this is what would be needed to build. A network of artificial 'climate recyclers' that would suck-in the air, water and trash to digest them and expel purified atmosphere, clean water and several streams of raw chemicals to be reused. These devices are an old, well practiced method of the space-faring Illithid-kin that we should not have any problems building."

The tea-master Grell shrugged eerily, pointing out an important detail; "You do however realize that these things are both BIG and very much organic constructs, like our ship? You will be putting large, pulsating, tentacular, smelly thingies in your landscape for the foreseeable future."

The human queen waved the aesthetic concerns off with an idle hand, stating "If it's a choice between living in the shadows of these blobs or laying dead in ornately carved ice crypts, I'm fairly certain the average citizen will prefer to live, and keep their families alive. Please start with the planning phase. I will revise it before authorizing the actual construction."

Nodding with his entire body doing a sort of forward tilt-bob movement, the leader Grell acquiesced the orders of the monarch. "Of course, my queen. Our ancient bonds with Britannia remain, and we shall serve as we can. In that vein of thought, I should mention that I have had to yet again neutralize the Americans' attempt to commit a retaliation strike against England, yesterday."

Sighing abjectly, the queen asked tartly "And what did the amateurs try, this time?"

"Since all of their 162 attempts to launch nuclear weapons at us have failed without discernible reasons as to why, as was the plan all along, a few of their military leaders still beholden to the Denarian or christian sects have gotten inventive. They tried to have smaller boats come in range of the Isles to shoot conventional missiles at the secret hospitals and research complexes of our armed forces. Their goal was to cause a catastrophic release of epidemiological materials to make us all sick to death, from our own bacterium and viruses."

Grunting blithely, the queen asserted "I gather since I'm not covered in pussy warts, or developing new organs and limbs, that they failed the attempt? Are there more of these knaves, or was it finally the end of this incompetence?"

Waving a tentacle indolently, the snobby Grell replied "Unfortunately, we still have a few years of this coming. The Denarian angels used a small bit of their Celestial might to brain-wash several hundred thousand people remotely, in every country that had living christians, and they didn't limit themselves to just humans, unlike the White Council had wanted. The angels had far greater, and further-reaching, plans for the future than the fools on the Inquisition tribunal could possibly ever understand. There will be pre-programmed puppets trying assassinations, terrorism and mass-death events every few years until the last of these cat's paws die."

The tea-master countered nastily while pouring everybody a new round of fresh spiced Assam, "You can't forget that religion is transmissible socially and mediatically. While the puppets can die naturally or violently, they can also teach their children their particular brand of fanaticism or create religious classes to 'educate' the general public. I predict it will be a few centuries before we no longer have any credible active threats from that cultural group."

And wasn't that a depressing thought. Elizabeth II rubbed her forehead as she tried to imagine how much effort it would be to find all the possibly contaminated people and change their minds by whatever means necessary. The sheer scale of the project made her balk at it, admitting to herself that this was a case of having no choices but dealing with each small piece as it became visible inside their field of action. At least, they had a plan for the climate change mess; that was a lot already.

Winter 1992 – A first hint of home

(Adrian Von Ziegler – The Sealed Kingdom)

Monday, November 2nd of 1992  
Mistgate Glen  
Point of Ayre, Isle of Man, The Britannic Realms

Harry was walking briskly through the empty village, gazing curiously at the derelict houses and occasional workshop or boutique that dotted the small community. Some were clearly ancient, or not human designs, or depended on magic to stay upright, and all were amusing to watch. The hamlet was supposed to have a central building for administration, a dedicated place where the citizens and visitors could come to gather, trade, and debate disputes before a magistrate of House Peverell to receive justice. Yet, they hadn't found the damned place. Rehz was flying some hundred feet above him, wondering along the same lines.

Where exactly was the bloody building put at?

Harry had followed the narrow boulevard that started near the stone bridge that gave access to the gate hub, going inland from there. It wasn't like there were that many intersections to cross, or that many structures to see. A little shy of three hundred wasn't that big a burgh. Still, what was supposed to serve as middle point for the congregation wasn't immediately apparent, as even the few recognizable religious edifices were small or medium sized, and very unassuming.

Rehz dropped down to eye level, letting his butterfly wings carry him effortlessly as they emitted psionic eddies to keep him afloat without movement. "You know Harry," the dragonnet posited in reptilian dialect, "Maybe the so-called town center isn't actually in the middle. Maybe they thought that since it would have a lot of traffic, they'd better place it out of the way to keep the few streets free for the locals."

Frowning in consideration, Harry nodded as he replied "Well then, maybe that big weird green building on the sea shore, on the outer left flank of the village would be it? It's bigger than either gate hub or guild warehouse, and nothing around is bigger. It certainly has enough stairs climbing up from the beach and wide terraces and balconies to serve as a hotel or town hall that hosts parties or public meetings. I don't get a very magical feeling from it, but it's been almost seven centuries since everything was shuttered. We may as well have a try."

The Faerie Drake went back up, enjoying the clear view and winds, while the child trudged in the inches of snow that had been accumulating over the day since sun-up. At least the snow was pure and clean, all impurities and radiation being removed by the Mythal Shields as it fell through.

Saluting kindly a few people he crossed on his way towards the outer left flank of the village, Harry stopped by a building he had never thought to see inside a village built by his ancestors. Then again, they had built the messy pile of offal in a very primitive, savage epoch, so maybe it wasn't so unusual as much as someone who had lived a sheltered life, like himself, could think. He had read in books and seen films on TV about things and events of the sort, but never thought he would have to touch them with his bare hands, even after the many trials he had seen in the Wizengamot where he cast guilty votes.

x----------x

It was a district jailhouse tower.

A tall, thin, ugly thing of cut dressed sandstone blocks, tarnished by age and bloodshed, that left precious few secrets for the imagination of peasants or tourists. The main component was a round tower some thirty feet wide, about five or six storey tall, topped by a ten foot wide embattled walkway and narrow, steep conical roof. This main tower had a small square annex extruding from its left side, the first two levels made of stones and the third made of thick oak logs. A third component was a small round tower, about the same size as the annex and placed right in front of it, if away by twenty-odd feet. This stone structure was two levels high with a flat embattled roof. Accessing the smaller tower was done by lowering a gang-plank from the annex's wooden level, unto the roof of the stand-alone turret. On the façade of the main tower was a solid masonry staircase, five feet wide, that was walled on the right side but open towards the center of the jailhouse courtyard.

Harry climbed up the stone stairs to see the rest of the edifices and structures in detail.

The main entry of the jail was barred by a door and small, rather stupid looking, wooden drawbridge hoisted by rusted iron chains. The bridge was down, and the rusted chains had fallen off long ago. In the very small open frontal courtyard, barely 40' x 40', stood a set of wooden platforms at eight feet high on wooden posts, accessible only from the plateau in the middle of the outside stairs, right where Harry had stopped walking. The foremost platform was 15' x 15' with a crude wooden block that still had a rusting ax stuck in it. The second platform was smaller and rectangular, around 6' x 12', just enough for the gallows built into the frame. The two eight feet high posts held aloft a cross beam between them, giving just enough space for two nooses to dangle side-by-side, each with its own trap door underneath.

The child made a face of disgust, knowing instinctively that he would find worse if he were to finish walking into the actual body of the jailhouse.

The small fortified building was integrated to the defenses of the village, being right on the intersection between the main gate-hub boulevard and the only wide-gauge cross-road, in the middle of the burgh. This was clearly an important edifice, one that had seen use in the past, but it still made the twelve year old uncomfortable to see the results with his own eyes, from up close. That crude wooden block wasn't to chop steaks, and those nooses didn't serve to hang deer for skinning or quartering, before the butchers did the smaller retail portions.

Harry was about to turn around and leave the accursed place of misery when the front door right above him opened to let out Amelia Bones and one of the less magical adults Gringotts had sent them. The pair were discussing in low tones when they stopped cold, surprised at the sight of the child-Lord on the plateau, at mid-height of reaching the drawbridge and doorway.

"Did you find anything useful in that heap of offal?" asked the young boy tartly, as he was not in the mood to hide his opinions today.

Amelia answered with a sympathetic smile, shaking her head negatively. "Not of immediate or vital importance, no. But useful, yes. Some old polearms, crossbows, and a few very old wall guns that use black powder and a lit wick to fire. The register of justice was still legible, since it was in a warded drawer in the prefect's desk. I sincerely doubt we have to worry about anybody written in those pages coming back for vengeance, unless they turned undead along the way."

Frowning tersely, a facial expression he was becoming intimately acquainted with, Harry asked the older woman "Then what could you possibly want with this damned hole of Perdition? They weren't using it just to administer canings to naughty school children or drunkards. Why do we need to worry about this cold shyte pile today?"

Giving the younger male an even more understanding face, Amelia countered softly "Because we never know when we will need a place to isolate an entity and deal with the threat they pose to the community. Whether it's only an episode of drunken rage, an accidental poisoning while brewing a new potion recipe, or somebody's mind gives out, preparations never hurt."

Snarking good and hard, Harry pointed a finger at the chopping block with the rusted ax still jutting out of it's surface, claiming tartly "Ask the last person to be knelt in front of that horror, about whether it hurt or not. I remember what my uncle did to me in the name of discipline and good morality, so when I see scaffolds with posts, blocks and gallows, I know what is really at stake. It's all about Power and control, not justice or keeping the peace, and protecting the community as a whole rarely, if ever, comes into it."

Whistling a low note, the man besides Amelia gave the kid a look up and down, from toes to head, commenting aloud "Wow! A Titled Lord who actually thinks before he does stuff to people on his land. Maybe we will have a decent chance to stay alive, despite all this mess outside the ward lines."

Ignoring the adults and their vaunted opinions of themselves, the child walked down the decrepit masonry stairs and back into the boulevard, aiming towards the gate-hub.

x----------x

Amelia used her 'Monocle of Doom' to scan the surroundings to insure they were alone again before turning to face her escort. Setting the optic device back to inert mode to spare her mind from the strain of useless datum, she gestured the male to follow her down the stairs as she ambled towards the small chapel that was across the inland boulevard.

"Tell me, Ranek, what do you think of our good Lord Peverell to date? You've had a month to look him over and see how he acts. So, spill it for me."

The younger man, mid twenties with tanned white skin, brown eyes and hair, clean shaven and dressed mostly in homemade leather clothing, walked by the country's last chief of DMLE at ease, unimpressed by her presence or old job. Most men his age would have been cowed by the way she had handled her department, or her combat prowess. And Amelia Bones' temper was legendary in its own right, too. Yet, the young adult seemed to not care a whit for all of this as he stuck his hands in his jacket pockets, walking amiably by her side.

Exhaling a breath more like a sigh, he answered "I don't rightly know, Ma'am B. I haven't exactly been in close contact with him since we left London. We never shared a boat or a hut. Plus, the kid's not a loner, but he keeps a tight group around him, a lot younger than me. The 'Alliance Core', the others have taken to calling them, when nobody from the higher ups are listening. Even to us squibs, it's pretty obvious who's in charge of this expedition. And when you see Lucius 'Kiss-my-royal-ass' Malfoy following orders from somebody, you know right quick who you're bowing to for a paycheck."

Snorting in amusement, Amelia admitted he was right about that. Seeing Lucius put in place and kept there by a twelve year old was quite the spectacle. There was an epoch of her life she would have given a month's wages to watch it happening, but time and experience had tempered her more juvenile urges, like vengefulness and pettiness.

"Still, Ranek, you're no spring chicken. You must have an opinion worth sharing?" she pressed anyways, because she knew the younger man was a stubborn mule, just like herself.

Squinting at the simplistic design of the chapel; a very normal European medieval style that was a basic rectangle with two-sided slanted roof and a semi-circular abside on the left side. Set back just a bit from the chapel's left side was a copse of wild trees that partially obscured the two different small wooden sheds that clearly belonged to the same lot. The sigil above the regular sized doorway in the church façade indicated it was consecrated to Archas Theos, patron of all occult sciences. The sheds were probably the chapel's workshops where the priests used to make spell-scrolls, candles, incense, oils, potions, and some-such. Nothing big, fancy or dangerous.

The young man ran a hand through his short hair, ruffling it in a gesture of frustration before he answered the battle-weary auror. "Look Boss-Lady, you know I've got no love lost for damned entitled bastards, but... This kid gives me a different feel. I just don't think I'm ready to figure out what that feeling is right away. But he's an odd sort, that's for sure."

Nodding in understanding, Amelia cast a simple spell to open the dying priest-lock on the chapel door to let them inside. Once in the simplistic prayer room, she charmed the six iron braziers to have light and heat. Damn, but this cold and snow were getting to her nerves. After that stint in the Styx with those unnatural blizzards, even regular winter was setting her nerves on edge.

Ranek leaned backwards until his thighs were against the armrest of a pew, letting him stand upright without wasting energy. He crossed his arms over his chest, waiting for the older woman to get to what she was circling around. For a blunt gal, she did tend to do that a lot.

Walking to the small stone altar at the front, Amelia Bones gazed severely upon the empty tabletop, covered only in cobwebs and centuries of dust. The cleanliness wards had failed a long time ago, if there ever were any set on the building. Given the age and primitive design, this was probably one of the first religious structures in town, and made in an era where the truly great magic of the Peverell had yet to emerge. It was probably as run-down and decrepit as it showed.

"Ranek," she addressed her colleague, "I want you to take a pair of crew and clean out that district jailhouse. From the conical gable to the lowest cellar. I want to know if there's a water well or escape tunnel underneath the foundations. And I want a written inventory of what we find, so we can discuss our options with the group at supper tonight."

Walking passed the relaxed male on her way out of the useless house of worship, Amelia added tersely "I know our group isn't auror recruits, let alone hit-wizards, but we have to start putting some organization and discipline in our community or we'll all go to Tarterus when we encounter a real beast or criminal. I want that containment facility functional, and the fortifications repaired until we can see to those small forts on each side of the village's sea shores. Those things look menial and near useless too, but they're better than nothing."

Shrugging carelessly, the workman replied "Yeah, sure thing Boss-Lady. Mind if I grab an elf or two? The little critters are just chompin' at the bit to do some cleaning around the place."

Amelia shook her head negatively on that one. "No, use no elves for this job. These lands belong to Harry Potter as the reigning Lord Peverell, therefore any elf would need his permission before they do any cleaning. That's why they're all restless in the two common buildings, instead of spit-shining the entire place till it glows like a flare spell. If you try to make them do anything, they will have to ask Potter, and his reaction a few minutes ago tells me that he's not yet able to process everything that's happened. This piece of decision just isn't worth having a fight over."

Ranek thought the woman didn't want to be told how to do her own job that she had a mastery diploma and badge for, long before the kid who would pull the strings was born. She might be good at stuffing her pride and temper at the back of her mind, but she still had them. The worker just hoped she didn't get bit when the Potter kid figured out what she had ordered done.

x----------x

Harry was actually happy with the initiative that Amelia was showing.

Yes, she hadn't strayed far from her basic job description, but that was a good thing. Their group had almost no dedicated fighters and only one certified auror, so seeing her at work was a good thing. The child may not like the subject matter or the tools implied, but he was realistic enough to understand that kindness alone could not run a large group of people. You needed basal rules, with rewards for better than expected behaviors, punishments for deviants or criminals, plus a set of laws just for foreign enemies.

None of the thought process was easy or happy to undertake, but it was necessary. Honestly, though, Harry would prefer to run with only the Peverell Alliance rules for a good long while, at least until strangers were authorized to visit them for trade. Until then, worrying about laws, rules, and codifying comportment's was just asking for people to start acting weird.

Well, weirder than their lives already were, anyways...

Briskly marching to keep the blood flowing warmly in his legs, Harry arrived at the gate-hub's bridge and turned towards the right, aiming for the large green building towards the end of the groomed beach line that fronted the village's sea side. He passed besides the guild warehouse's rear side, noting that the elves had cleaned up and repaired the structure quite competently, not that they would do any less even without orders.

As he walked passed the primary assembly point of their group, Harry was accosted by his two god-parents, Franklin and Alice Longbottom, who were making an effort to move around with crutches to get some strength back into their legs. Each had managed to get their wands back from the stuff Neville had retrieved from Longbottom Manor, just before their escape, so they were tooled for the trip as any of their crew had been.

"Hey, little guy," called out Frank with a bratty smirk firmly in place, "It's a good thing you don't like wearing hats, even in winter. It makes spotting that wild beast's nest called 'Potter hair' in a crowd easier."

Snorting at the older man's childishness, the boy replied gamely "It's called 'Lord Potter Style', I'll have you know. One of my ancestors patented it, after he put it in the Family's Blood-Law."

Alice laughed gaily at that, countering "I could believe that. Especially if the guilty party was James or his father Charlus. Both of them had the same silly humor to do it. And Lily had the skills to make it happen, too, although she had the common sense not to. She was a sensible girl that way."

Nodding at that comment, Harry declared "I will forever be grateful that she didn't let James call me 'Hairy' or 'Hairley' as he had initially wanted. And Sirius' idea of 'Shaggy' was beyond the realm of good taste by a margin. I won't say aloud what Pettigrew had imagined, I still shudder at the thought. Lupin, at least, was kind enough to abstain from commenting."

Alice teased him "It's your fault for being born with a black tuft atop your head. I know it can happen that babies have a little bit of almost transparent down on their scalp, but that charcoal mop was something else."

Shrugging carelessly, Harry waved away her joke with a simple "I blame Dumbledore's potions during mom's pregnancy. Everybody else does, and the auror investigations show that it was probably what happened to me since she was doped from age 11 onwards."

Frank sighed sadly, the sound coming out of his mouth with a dense cloud of white vapor that danced amidst the falling snowflakes. "I really wish we'd been able to take care of you when you were orphaned, Harry. But you know what happened to us was bad. Even the Family Magick has transferred to Neville without a fight because I can't rightly take over anymore. Every time I hear about what that bearded wanker did to our children and extended kin..."

Harry stepped closer to his kin, giving them both a sympathetic expression as he said "It wasn't your fault, to either of you. He had been at it for decades before you were even born, and your parents were already under his alchemical influence when they conceived you. Nobody can fight such a perfidy without external help. I only got free because of my late friend Dryskholl, as well as the old bastard having a coronary, otherwise we'd be having a very different conversation, if any exchange at all. It was never in his plans for us to connect in this world."

Both adults were saddened by the knowledge of that cruel truth, but happy that the boy didn't blame them for events outside of their control. They had the time to speak on several occasions during their trip through the Styx River, having shared many boats and huts along the way. They knew him to be a calm, thoughtful and considerate person, far closer in mindset to a mature adult than to any child they had known, although his friend Hermione Dagworth-Granger was close. By the same token, he had learned to appreciate them as human beings who were stable despite their ailments, and warmed up to them considerably since they were often with Neville when Harry came by to see his god-brother. The two boys had quite the animated discussions about plants, horticulture, farming, ranching and butchery, for such young lads. Both parents still thought those were more age appropriate than their deeply depressing conversations about laws, politics, alliance business and warfare around the planet. Watching all the kids gathered around a bonfire to talk about matters that used to be reserved for adults only always made them sad to their bones.

"Where are you going?" Franklin asked curiously, "You seem to be lost."

Shaking his head to remove some of the light snow that had accumulated in his already wild hair, the boy replied amiably "No, but not far. I am looking for the bloody town center, and I can't find it because it isn't indicated on any of the buildings' façades."

Alice blinked a few times, wondering aloud "Euh, kiddo, isn't the town center just really the middle of the geography where the village is built? At least, that's what I remember from the classes I got in primary school."

Laughing amusedly at his god-parents, Harry countered "Yes, that's what most people think when they talk about a town center. The biggest concentration of shops and posh boutiques for the wealthy people. Or just the biggest shopping mall and merchant avenues around it for muggle culture. But the Peverell saw things a bit differently when they built the Glens. To them, the town center was an actual, determined building that held the burgomaster and his officials like the scribes and tax collectors. In the smaller villages, it also had the prefects and healers, all under a single roof to make finding emergency services easier."

Alice nodded her understanding as she raised her hands to her face to remove a bit of snow that had blown across their group, borne by a sudden gust. "So, you're looking for something big enough, and presumably defensible enough, to hold several key functions until the village grows big enough to have several buildings to split everything apart."

The boy nodded unhappily, grumbling "My damned ancestors obviously bet on oral tradition and the helpfulness of the locals to guide newbies and tourists, because precious few of the buildings have any signage at all. I can accept that most of it fell off or was destroyed by weather, but I still expected the bloody admin center to be better identified, like the gate-hub or guild hall."

Frank rubbed the side of his frozen nose, wondering aloud "Well then, how are you trying to find the building? Did you try a 'point me' charm? Or maybe a 'comprehend estate' charm?"

Harry nodded unhappily, growling nastily "My ancestors were paranoid buggers who set up the entire Glen to be 'unplottable', except that it's the antiquated version of the wards. Instead of creating a curtain or bell around the zone to cover, it fills it completely so you can't use location spells inside either. I have to manually search every bloody building or wait for an accidental report at supper from some of the people who went out exploring. Bloody inefficient, if you ask me."

"Well, we did ask you," Alice quipped playfully, "so thank you for telling us so kindly, good sir. We are in your debt for instructing us on the ways of this here township." The older woman tried to make a mocking shallow curtsy but almost tripped on her crutches instead, eliciting laughter from the two men at her efforts to stay standing and dry.

Pointing towards the large, complex structure with faded green roofs and walls in the distance, Harry invited his god-parents to accompany him on his small trek. "It will be adventurous! Think of all the beasties we could encounter! Besides our reflections making weird faces at us from mirrors, we could even scare up some dust bunnies from under the furniture. What excitement that would be!"

Snorting at her god-son, Alice replied in fake-sadness "Oh, what shame it is, to behold such sarcasm and skepticism in one so juvenile and innocent! Oh, woe is us, for the loss of such youth that never shall be regained!"

Franklin laughed heartily at his wife's antics while Harry gifted her a golf-clap, commenting airily "Wow, I thought you were gonna swoon there, for a second. Very Victorian of you, that sort of emoting. And very womanly, too, in a précieuse sort of way."

The boy's comment just made Frank laugh harder as Alice joined him in his mirth. Their god-son did have a good sense of humor, and appreciated the more developed jests and quips of adult age, rather than just the sounds & smells common to teenaged joking. He was very different from his father and uncles in this regard, something that neither Longbottom were eager to change.

x----------x

The trio of relatives arrived at the great terraced building that was second to last along this side of the beach-line. The other structure was smaller but drearier and menacing; a sort of small fort, less imposing than Hogwarts by a lot. It was still more daunting because it lacked any decoration or embellishments, making it a purely combative edifice instead of a residence or monument.

The green building was obviously meant to house a large crowd because it had multiple entry points to its main level, which was wrapped by a covered porch with many staircases. The building was set back from the two-lane cart road that paralleled the beach-line, making it almost like a peninsula atop a short rocky spur that connected to the village by a long and wide masonry terrace. Several curving staircases went from that stone walkway down to the beach itself, allowing the solid structure to act as a pier for small boats, or let people fallen to the waves have a chance to climb out of the freezing sea waters.

The trio replenished their warming charms and climatic bubbles to have less snow pile atop their bodies as they walked, lest they start looking like gauzy snowmen in short order. They walked along the elevated stone pier, noticing how it was a full ten feet above the beach sand and waves.

When they arrived at the building proper, they could see that it's façade begun with a wide staircase to climb up to the wrap-around porch, and that there were desolate flower beds artfully arranged to form two symmetrical promenade gardens, one on each side of the terrace. In the middle of each garden stood a round basin with a sculpted fountain that hadn't spouted water in centuries, if not longer. From this close, they could see that the roofs had numerous levels and were more of a rounded style than gables or angled flanks. It gave the structure a slightly Asian or High Elvish appearance, especially when they tried to imagine the original shade of green that had been in the shingles and decorative wooden flourishes in the windows and doorways.

After gazing at the many rounded towers that emerged from the roof-lines of the three main wings of the building, and trying to make sense of the floors by cataloging the balconies, Harry decided that he would only get his answers inside. The trio walked up the main stairs, with Franklin commenting that these looked to be ceremonial steps, given that they were shallow in height but deep in surface, to allow people to stand on them during formal presentations.

The main floor plan was relatively simple as it was composed of three large halls linked together with a few spiral staircases, going up and also down, thus indicating the presence of lower floors carved into the rocky outcropping that the building was perched on. Harry was pretty sure they had finally found the right spot as the Peverell crest was inlaid in an artful mosaic in the floor of the central hall, just inside the principal entrance.

The main hall was obviously for great assemblies and receptions as it held wooden bleachers split in four blocks of 12 seats per row, stacked six levels high, for a total of 288 auditors. From the entryway, you had bleacher blocks on your right and left, then across a wide open space you had the other two blocks with a raised bench and pulpits located between them. This was clearly some sort of debate or council room, because it looked like the Wizengamot chamber a lot. On the far right and left of the hall were the wide doorways into the lateral wings. On each side of the stacked bench and pulpits were corridors that allowed access to staircases and the wrap-around porch's seaside sections. Thankfully, the doors on that side were closed just as they had been in the front, or else the building would have rotted out completely.

Harry let the two adults sit on the lowest bleachers to rest their legs and bodies, weary from so much effort in the open wind and snow. Even though this cold was lesser than they experienced in the Styx, they were in fact more exposed as their time in the riverine plane had been spent inside boats or huts, never really out in the open as they hadn't yet healed enough to risk walking around on moving decks. A few quick cushioning charms and conjuration of a glass jar for some Blue-Bell flames had the adults set for a while.

The child climbed up to the bench, thinking that was probably the burgomaster's seat during village assemblies and trials for the few crimes they experienced. In reality, given how widely open the floor between the bleachers was, Harry thought the room was used more for balls and public celebrations than just debates or trying offenders. The Wizengamot chamber's middle had been quite a lot smaller and less inviting than this setup, what with the tables, chairs and iron cage in which suspects were displayed / contained for trials. He liked this configuration better.

Arriving at the top tier of the bench, he sat in the chair and began to look through mail cubbies, open drawers, and even put his hands in the little spaces between the chair frame and cushions to see if anything had fallen there and been forgotten. The chair itself and the exposed cubbies were all empty, but the thin drawer right under the table's writing surface held a letter in an oiled leather pouch sealed with a wax crest than anchored a priestly Seal.

Since the Seal on the letter was that of the Peverell sect of the Hades cult, Harry simply used a sanctified cantrip to offer a Blood Tithe to the embossed wax wafer. The mini ritual unlocked the Seal correctly, giving him access to the pouch's interior. There was a letter composed of several pages written on vellum, and a bone amulet on a long silver chain, thusly a necklace. At the bottom of the pouch was a bronze ring with three iron skeleton keys attached.

The letter was from the last Lord Peverell, dated in the calendar of the Hadean church, some 714 years ago. It was a short summary of why the Glens had suffered such a catastrophic decline, and whom the Family suspected to be responsible. The Originator of the house-elves had a rather prolific descendancy, and they had found out what the Peverell had done to the creations of their forefather, thusly usurping their wealth, authority and Powers. They had sworn Blood-Feud until the extermination of the House of Peverell, to the end of all Lines joined or allied without even allowing for the possibility of establishing peace through marriage contracts.

These bastards had been hunting and killing Peverell for several millenia, whittling away at the Family tree a dozen people at each generation until almost none remained. And so, to protect the Glens, their greatest secret and achievement, from being found and usurped by these enslavers and murderers, the last Lord had sealed the network before his Heir Primus was even born. This decision proved judicious as the 'Blood Compact' told Harry that the man died before his wife gave birth to their child. Except she birthed a daughter who was a squib, who then married with another squib, and so on, so the line went into Abeyance until Harry was procreated.

The bone amulet was the Crest of Mistgate Glen, and the keys opened the keystone vault, the Clan bank vault in the building's foundations, and the burgomaster's office, in the upper floors. The letter warned that the town center didn't have any bedrooms, so the man had left the keys to his dwelling in the house itself when it was abandoned, as most people had done with their own buildings as they died or moved out of the Glens.

Well, that answered some questions, now didn't it. Harry walked back to the two waiting adults, to show them the letter and items, informing them of his decision. "I'm going to tell the group about this tonight, at dinner. That will allow me to find one or two people competent with wards to help me open the keystone room to reset the defenses properly. Although, given the cleanliness of the air and water here compared to what we see falling outside the perimeter, plus the absence of large or dangerous animals, I would wager that they are working pretty well already."

The two adults conceded easily as it was the plain truth, and his idea was the safest course o action he could do. Blood-Law and House Lord or not, engaging unknown wards without backup was never a good idea, especially if you had no training to handle such systems or devices.

Winter 1992 – Of the forging of Empires

(Two Steps from Hell – Emerald Princess)

Monday, November 2nd of 1992  
Forbidden City  
Beijing, China, Empire of Qin

The figure of richly wrapped fossilized bones that was Qin Shu Sifa-Chidu, first Head of Family Shu and Founding Lord of House Qin, First Son of Heaven and Founder of the Empire of Qin, stood immobile on the wooden balcony, looking at the serene mountains in the horizon. He was presently in the last inhabitable floor of the Shinto Spire, an ancient shrine and teaching complex that had been invisible to muggles and infidels for nearly four millenia, predating the constructions of Beijing township and the Forbidden City by an untold epoch.

A stooped elderly figure shuffled in the office, preparing bronze tea cups according to a ceremonial that as beautiful as it was antique. The female priestess placed the vessels and utensils in the serving tray, next to the glowing warm hibachi, then sat on her short-legged chair, silently waiting for her Emperor to finish his contemplations before the meeting proceeded.

Sighing the deep, forlorn exhale that only the undead of great age were able to produce, the six thousand year old arch-priest and mandarin turned back his mind towards the more mundane aspects of managing a Realm from a public position.

Beurkh! Politics. And politicking.

If only the idiot English had not botched the reveal of magic, he could still be resting inside his mausoleum, in the highest peaks of the Three Gorges, without being beset by such self-imbued cads and knaves. Glaring as mightily as was possible when one's face was shrouded by layers of funeral silks and a jade mask that let only the eye holes empty, the richly bedecked Imperial Power Lich tried to impress upon the priestess the depths of his displeasure. The glowing silver lights made by his soul in the pits of his orbits would normally render any who gazed upon them to quivering masses of abjectly cowering flesh.

The elderly priestess took up her bronze cup to sip tea, uncaring of the monarch's displeasure.

Sighing again, Qin Shu Sifa-Chidu moved his frail body with the swathes of silk wrappings, official robes and jewelry to sit in the matching small wooden chair across from the serving table. He took up his own bronze cup to sip the beverage, using an old power built into his physicality whence he ascended to lichdom, to move the food through the mask's decorative but solid mouth imitation into his actual mouth and down. As for what happened to food and drink when being swallowed by a being that was essentially a puppet of wired animated bones... well, nobody knew. And nobody had asked the elderly emperor so it still wasn't known.

The priestess made no sign she had witnessed the act that went against the Natural Order of Things, such as mere mortals imagined it to be, happen in her august presence. Eyes partially closed in silent appreciation of her drink, she basked in the warmth of the charcoal burning hibachi that was a nice contrast to the frigid air blowing through the open balcony door, despite it being the start of winter at this latitude. Whether she even cared for her exalted guest or his great Powers was another thing that yet remained unsaid, with no hints forthcoming.

The pair of old crones sat in comfortable silence for nearly a half hour, sipping several cups of tea until they had reached the point where both of their thoughts were clear enough and lined-up properly for an intelligent conversation to be sustained. Decisions needed to be made, and an Empire needed to be forged anew. Therefore, it behooved Sifa-Chidu to put the appropriate pieces of raw ore in the crucible, so that he could smelt something that would then be smithed into a functional system at the end.

The old woman raised her face towards the skeletal sovereign, the movement setting her yellow silk hood and shawl backwards from her face, revealing the glowing pale blue tattoos on her cheeks and forehead, publicly demonstrating what her religious Faith, Creed and Cause were.

In a voice that resounded of Antiquity itself, the old woman asked "What service can the Avatorial conclave perform for your Majesty this day?"

Gazing into the ethereal blue eyes that matched his for antiquity and occultism, the founding emperor of China replied "I need the wisdom of the ancients, to guide me further. I have ruled as fairly and equitably a my feeble human nature allowed me. I even achieved lichdom in attempt to divest myself of human foibles, to become more just, more stable for my people. Instead, all I did was find a way to detach myself from their daily lives, more than I had ever been. If it is in the abilities of the Honorable Ancestors of your Shinto cult, I would beseech the Avatars of the Elements to teach me a path to approach material reality anew. I cannot rule honestly what I cannot understand or relate with."

The voice coming from the woman became polytonal, like a choir made of thousands of voices singing in harmony; "We know the first steps that must be made, but wish to know what you have already done to the Empire before seeking our council."

Nodding, the undead ruler answered "I have used the lives of criminals to Power a ritual of the Wyrd Mastery by which I have bound all the soldiers of the nation to not fire or deploy any of our atomic or biological weapons. It is the event that decided me to rule publicly again. Just after the British struck across the christian lands, some of the less controlled, less stable elements of our own military triggered a nuclear attack on the English Commonwealth, including America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. A totally unjustified attack, as these had not been part of England's strike force, and were in fact victimized by it. Therefore, I assembled a conclave to sacrifice thirteen circles of thirteen criminals to absorb sufficient energies to commit a 'Greater Word of Undoing' upon the very emotion that moved our undisciplined soldiers to act against their orders. The result was a backwards manipulation of time, a few days in the past, that eliminated the fear, outrage and hubris that motivated the deluded soldiers to commit the attack without having received my order to do so. I followed the spell with a more mundane psionic order to take offline and secure all atomic or biological warheads, of any type or style, back into their cold storage facilities indefinitely."

The polytonal voice commented "You have undone a second wave of fire and sulfur from staining Mother Gaia, and imposed peace and stability upon the Eastern Realms. You are well started on your quest to reintegrate amongst the living, Sifa-Chidu. You may be ancient to the point of obsolescence in the eyes of many, but you yet have many years of noble service in you. The Conclave of Avatars believes that your intentions are honorable, and your methods have validity that can be argued, given the dire situation of the world."

Nodding slowly, the skeletal monarch explained "I plan to ask the rulers of the smaller nations to voluntarily join Qin to form a bigger, safer and, hopefully, better nation than what we each have as separate pieces. I wish to avoid warfare and conflict, as Nature has suffered enough indignities from human hands as it is. I wish not to be responsible for inflicting yet further sufferings upon Gaia if it can be avoided."

Peering into the bronze tea cup, the Vessel of the Avatars replied idly "It is the basal nature of mortals to seek choices and alternatives based on emotions, where there appears to only be paths marked by logic and justice. We foresee much strife and violence, if you wish to unite more countries, cultures and sects under the Sigil of Qin. However, it has always been the Law of Nature that only those fittest and most adapted be allowed to survive and reproduce, thusly giving the following generation their history and benefits. You have endured thus far, Emperor, what is it that makes you doubt your path, or aged wisdom, this day?"

"Atomic fire for one," replied simply the magically animated corpse, "and the folly of those who shake vials of reagents in obscure, unmarked, basement workshops for another. I have a feeling that the coming round of conflicts for succession and uniting nations into bigger units will not have the same reach, nor the same effects, as they did in my youth. Humans, and many others species, have learned to kill hundreds of thousands remotely, silently, without ever putting their own body at stake. Firearms and explosives were bad enough as tools of death-dealing, but missiles, drones and satellites were on a level that no ruler wished to engage. Yet, the muggles have built these things completely without any magic or divine miracles to power them, and now they hang over our heads, strong enough to challenge even the best of our siege-wards or warfare spells. I fear, my ghostly old friends, that we have lived this long only to witness the pyre that will cremate our antiquated vanities to ash."

The Conclave replied gently "Perhaps, it is as you say. Perhaps we come to the winter of our lives at long last. Or, mayhaps we simply see the size of the mountain that is blocking out the sun, forgetting that the solar orb will in fact rise above it soon enough, all on its own. It is not for our kind to decide if it is light or dark in the world, only to live and witness that world, as it lives in the way that Gaia had intended. Our best advice is the same as it always has been for centuries; do what you must, then do what you can, and maybe you will have enough time and life left to do as you wish. That is all that any living entity can hope for in their time on Earth."

Snarking good and hard, the emperor asked "And since I'm undead instead of being alive, could you perhaps have some advice that's better than the blasted fortune cookie proverbs you peddle to the novices? I need guidance, visions, portents, anything other than what my own limited Sight can give me, dammit!"

Sighing in despair, the entire Avatorial Conclave whispered sadly "We just gave you the very best that we have in store. None of use were ever educated in the higher sciences of the mundane world, and alchemy was more a crafter's job than that of a philosopher leading a school. Plus, none of us ever had much of a military training passed personal self-defense. Megatonic nuclear weapons and large scale troop movements were never what we were educated to deal with. If you want to learn an animal tongue or how to see the Ley Lines, we'll gladly reveal ancient lores to you. Otherwise, we are out of our depths, as many as we are."

Closing her eyes for a second, the elderly woman's tattoos stopped glowing, her aura dissipating and it was ordinary brown eyes that she opened to gaze pensively upon her monarch. "You know," she commented, "when I took my initiate vows in the Shinto Spire nearly 109 years back, I wasn't told that I would help manage the country from behind the throne. And uniting several nations together certainly wasn't in the temple's recruitment brochure. I think you'll be owing me some overtime pay for this, once it's all done."

Smirking invisibly behind layers of silk and jade, the lich-kin replied airily "We'll, at least you have the satisfaction to know that your request was treated at the highest levels of the mandarinate bureaucracy. I'm sure that seeing your file used as tea cup coaster by the Hallowed Emperor himself will bring your House, ancestors and descendants, great honor for ages to come."

Snorting amiably, the elder priestess snarked back "Why don't you take off that mask and drink straight with your mouth, that way we can figure out if liches can choke on it, like the rest of us."

For some weird reason, the poor woman had the impression that the carved green jade mask was making a bratty smirk at her expense. But it hadn't been sculpted that way, so it couldn't just move its shape like that... Could it?

Winter 1992 – Unlocking the past

(Albert Ketèlbey – In a Persian market)

Tuesday, November 3rd of 1992  
Mistgate Glen  
Point of Ayre, Isle of Man, The Britannic Realms

On Monday night Harry had told the assembled group of his findings, including who had been behind the systematic killing of his kindred. The meeting had ended with the selection of Amelia Bones, Garrick Ollivander and Severus Snape as those most competent with ward matrices and their configuration. It was Tuesday morning, after breakfast, when Harry and the three adults took to the streets to go open the ward control room in the newly discovered town center.

Amelia was still annoyed by their incapacity to map the Glen other than by hand and paper, so she was scanning as much as she could with her monocle. Garrick was busy organizing the contents of his tool satchel as he walked, keeping to a straight line by dint of Dobby who was besides him. The elf had volunteered to come with them in case they needed to be evacuated back to their group for medical treatment, if the ward controller malfunctioned. Harry was walking besides professor Snape who was using two canes to move autonomously in the accumulated snow. Rehz was floating along Harry at shoulder height so he could speak with him or Dobby.

Because it hadn't stopped snowing all damned night, they had close to a foot high accumulated.

The group of six made good time to the green roofed and trimmed building, taking advantage of the fact that the snow had stopped falling some time during dawn. A few quick swipes of the hands by Dobby had cleared the path, allowing the humans a relatively easy walk.

"So, Amelia," Harry asked loud enough to get the woman's attention, "what did your guys find in that ugly pile of rocks? Another ax or three? Or maybe a wrack?"

Turning towards the boy with a frown on her face, the auror realized that she hadn't been as subtle or discrete as she thought she'd been. Turning back to scanning the buildings along the sea-front boulevard, she answered "They found almost nothing worth saving, or even recycling. Just trash, dirt, and dust with a few cobwebs. The pitiful few items got brought to the guild warehouse last night, so we could refurbish them into service during the day. The building is now ready to clean out and put to use, as soon as you tell the elves."

Harry surprised the adults by replying politely "Thank you for doing your job competently without me having to order you, or push you for completion. I appreciate having Alliance members that are autonomous and capable. It allows me to concentrate on figuring out where we're all going with this mess the Denarians and British navy have left us to survive."

Nobody said anything more as they walked into the town center's main hall, since they were busy thinking on the boy's words. Harry guided them up the first set of spiral stairs, all the way to the floor where the important offices were situated. The burgomaster and town councilors were in the mid-height point of the upper edifice, with a conference room that had a balcony overlooking the front-side of the building, for public orisons during holidays and celebrations. The floor was as wide as the main hall beneath it, with a balcony that wrapped all around, but left the council's ceremonial alcove separate and sheltered.

The group of six arrived at the proper floor and quickly found the office they were looking for given that each door still had a brass plate with the title of the function it belonged to. All the rooms were basically the same size, just a bit different because the building had such an odd rounded shape on so many of its levels. Harry used the key to drop the wards on the doorway and let the team inside the cozy room. It was decorated in the old fashion from several centuries ago that favored carved wood paneling on the walls and furniture crafted of heavy brown wood pieces with thick black leather upholstery. There were small copper sconces hung high on the walls around the room to hold small pieces of carved stone enchanted with permanent light.

The twelve year old walked behind the desk to sit in the chair, gesturing vaguely at his companions to sit as they wished. The boy busied himself with opening the drawers to find a map of the Glen and a manual or grimoire for the ward keystone as the adults looked around the shelves and dressers curiously. Dobby cleaned the dust and webs, refreshed the light charms and spelled open the chimney flue then summoned some chopped wood from their camp for the old cast iron stove that was fitted fully inside the masonry hearth. Soon, a cheery fire spread out heat and life, allowing the humans to relax and take off their winter coats as they browsed through the antiquated archives of the village mayor.

Harry soon found what he was looking for, as the last Lord Peverell had done like the keys, by placing everything in the central drawer under the writing surface. There were three different maps of the Mistgate Glen, a chain with many varied keys on it, and the burgomaster's grimoire that held all the secrets and procedures to keep the small hamlet going. In the first pages of the book were the building plans for the gate-hub and town center, as well as the six fortified buildings that had been foreseen as necessary when they established the Mythal Shield. The entire ward matrix was decentralized, anchored to the seven capital buildings around the perimeter and center of the village, while the administrative building where they sat only served as controller for the network. There was only a small power sink and crystal pillar underneath their feet, only big enough to protect the edifice and a short perimeter around it.

Making Harry frown, the text in the obsolete grimoire stated that the glen's first constructions had been, in order, the gate-hub, the town center, the district jailhouse in the middle, the four small forts at the corners of the bubble, and the militia command fortress, which wasn't all that bigger than the regular watchposts. There were four command nodes for the Mythal Shield but only the town center could order the wards to lower into inactivity for maintenance or getting a new setup. All the other consoles only served to manage the defenses in case the Glen was taken over by a hostile force or catastrophe that destroyed the primary command positions.

Harry's job would be quite simple for the moment; all he needed was to climb up a few floor into the central tower of the town center, give blood to the altar/console and touch it with his sigil ring to reboot the systems at full power. He didn't need to know anything about the theories and mechanics of wards, just read the Hadean pictographs and touch those he wanted to activate with the bone amulet recovered from the main hall. The only times ward-masters were needed was if they opened the underground vaults where the actual emitters were hidden to keep them safe.

Yep, his ancestors had been bright people.

They made a system simple enough that even a young child could manage the functions without any formal training or adult supervision, as long as he had two heirlooms and the grimoire, so the only real necessity was the language skills to read and understand the tongue used. The versions of English and Latin used were antique nowadays, but had been the ordinary speech of the day for noble families, when the book was written. Normally, any child from the senior, cadet and minor branches of the Peverell would have been able to read this grimoire by age 8 and use the simplistic instructions to safeguard the community, so long as they stayed inside the Glen.

Having read through the first thirty-odd pages of the book, Harry spoke up to explain what he had found, and what he would be doing shortly. After that, he would need to read carefully through the history and instructions before moving forward. So, in the meanwhile, the refugees should work on establishing greenhouses and livestock pens or barns, and having at least one fishing boat, even if it only worked with sails and oars. The boy could speed-read the tome with spells easily, but comprehension would take time, especially since he had not been raised in this cultural standard since birth, unlike all other who had held the Peverell Heirship.

The adults agreed with his evaluation of things, and escorted him upstairs to connect with the console and restart the defensive and management systems. The process was in fact just as easy to enact as promised in the grimoire, but it also showed just how manual all the controls were. The system had very few automatisms, and the only way to set these programs was to power down the crystals to maintenance mode to encode the changes, then reboot everything. It was like one of the old telephone standards from the late 1800's, where an operator had to manually move wires from plug to plug to form connections between caller and auditor. This made for a simple device to setup, but incredibly painful and slow to change configuration on the fly. It also made it impossible to adapt to new circumstances during a siege or war because some functions needed to bring down the entire Shield bubble to configure and power-up.

The control altar was placed in a chamber that had windows on eight sides so the comptroller could see that the effects of the pre-programmed functions he was triggering, to make sure everything was working as predicted. Again, a simplistic solution that almost nothing could hack or falsify, and didn't need special training to use. After some fifteen minutes in the upper room, the Mythal Shield was now up to full strength, the pillars channeling more raw magick to steady and refresh the matrix faster than the degradation rate inflicted by the nuclear fallout that was floating around the planet's atmosphere and oceans.

For the rest, it would come in time, as only reading, discovery and practice could produce.

Winter 1992 – Undesirable guests

(Horst Wessel 1929 - Die Fahne hoch)

Thursday, November 5th of 1992  
Gringotts Bank  
London, England, The Britannic Realms

If somebody was writing a book or film about this, they would no doubt call it the 'mandatory Nazi attack to make things worse' trope. A plot device that had become somewhat common since the 1970's in American literature and movies, usually in the 'B' grade stuff. Except that these bastards were the Teutonika Zauberer Ritter (sorcerous Teutonic Knights) of the Walpurgisnacht Hegemony founded by Gellert Grindelwald in the 1920's, just after the close of World War I.

The uniforms, badges and tools were a dead give-away. Why bin what worked?

Everything started around 4:00am when three 5-ton UK army trucks, six-wheeled metal beasts, rolled onto Charring Cross road and stopped exactly on 'Ground Zero' of where the Revelation of Magick had happened some seven weeks ago. The vehicles parked in a line on the side of the street that was still passable, the section near where The Leaky Cauldron used to stand being nothing but a charred crater filled with rubble. From the back of each truck disembarked twelve humanoid figures, wrapped from head to toe in armored black leather in a cut and style that any mundane or magical entity should recognize on sight in this epoch.

The uniform of the Nazi party's Waffen Schutzstaffel; the SS corps.

Although in this case, it was specifically the sorcerers still loyal to the ideology and creed set in place by Grindelwald who, just like neo-nazis, never admitted the defeat of their movement's founder and sought at all costs to finish his wars and enemies. The black-clad magical soldiers had modernized though, taking advantage of the five decades interlude to change tools, training, tactics and long-term strategies, to include most of the muggle methods proven successful by any side of World War II and the following conflicts.

One of the first things they had improved was their understanding of WHY their movement and cause had failed to rally the magical and mundane human populations to the creeds of racial superiority and Blood-Purity, despite that they had already been very popular philosophies at the time when the Walpurgisnacht Hegemony was instituted. The synergies between the human groups of mundanes and magicals should have created a self-sustaining cycle of hatred and domination, crushing all other beastly species and inferior human ethnic groups. So why had they never managed to penetrate the individual psyches and collective movances further than the most superficial levels, and rarely those who were influential or rich?

Once they figured out that the mathematics of their small sectarian groupuscule would never allow them any sort of edge against the billions of enemies arrayed before them, the hierarchy revised everything in depth. They had survived the blasted folly of a war that was fought far too soon, and without the needed preparations, but they would learn from this and do better. What they could not achieve with the small numbers of living humans, they would create by using 'force multiplier' devices and situations that would give them a dominant stance in the fight. As the age of television gave way to the Digital Age of the World Wide Web, the magical nazis got exactly what they wanted. Remote controlled machinery that could be built on an assembly line by inferior minions for a handful of coins would now be the hordes of unstoppable soldiers they needed to eradicate opponents in droves. Like the muggles had found out a century before, the sorcerers realized that a single machine-gun could mow down dozens at each salvo, compared to a handful per spell for the average wizardly caster. Truly great warlocks like Grindelwald were rare and took decades to train, so they could not bank on such level of skill to win. No, they had to think like the muggles and calculate strategies based on the lowest competence ranks.

So the Walpurgisnacht Hegemony chose to use blades, guns, grenades, flame-throwers, poison gases and mechanized vehicles to move troops, and do most of the fighting. Enhancing the low-end soldiers' equipment with runes or alchemical varnish was a cheap and easy 'force multiplier' that their enemies would never anticipate to see their faithful use.

It was time to prove they had learned well, and to win the war at long last.

From the second truck were brought out several thin pieces of titanium alloy engraved and inlaid with crystalline scriptworkes of the highest caliber human scholars could produce today. The soldiers assembled the pieces into a circular frame that lay flat on the ground. Then they took out exactly similar pieces from the other trucks, which they assembled and set atop the frame already on the ground.

A lieutenant whose specifications of gender or age were obscured by the face-mask and helmet signaled the engineer-magus team to trigger the ward-sapping system. Within seconds, the frame flat on the asphalt vibrated so tremendously that the few windows not broken in the adjacent buildings shattered when the sound-wave reached them. The phonon drill dug down through layer after layer of pavement, stones, dirt, brick sewer tunnels, more rock, and even more deep rock until it stopped when it hit a void. The plume of thick choking ash that had been expelled from the top opening of the circle stopped for a few seconds while the engineer-maguses cast specialized geomantic divinations to find their target, then the device was fired again for several more seconds.

As it vaporized all simple elements or compound alloys in its way, the drilling beam stopped hard as it began to rebound on the much anticipated Gringotts Perimeter Wards. At that point, the highly trained military curse-breakers used handheld crystal pads to make the digging rig scan the obstacle and synthonize the ward-line frequencies and harmonics. A few icons tapped and the circular frame resting atop the pile of three disappeared, only to reappear at the bottom of the well, floating atop the dense ward matrix, before slowly sinking into it to merge with the energy flows, thusly creating an empty window through the shield curtain.

Several scanners placed around the ruins of Diagon Alley by the Knights of Walpurgis in the preceding years began to sound shrill alarms in their comm-lines, warning them of the increasing power output coming from the bank's main ward emitters. It was still too late; with the outer perimeter breached, the engineer-maguses fired the phonon drill again, vaporizing yet more solid rock until they hit the goblin tunnel they had been aiming for, inside the inner perimeter of the vast subterranean complex. Their task was hard, but had thankfully been made easier by the fact that the part of the goblin warren they wanted was actually built much later than the core of the vault tunnels, in the years 1200's. The goblin kings hadn't seen the need for a specially built prison block and execution hall before that era, since crime had been easily manageable before then.

The ward-sapping crew adjusted their drill one last time to punch through two more floors before they were satisfied they had reached the right level. The curse-breakers went to action anew, scanning the newly revealed barrier then sending down the last ward-window and securing it in place, inside the energy field. With a direct, open-air well-shaft linking the surface to the domain of the underground peoples, the Teutonic sorcerers could now accomplish their mission.

The lieutenant signaled the first patrol of six SS storm troopers to take place around the circular rig, with their backs turned to the empty well in the middle. A short flash of blue light and the space was empty, the six heavily armed men having been teleported flawlessly down into one of the goblins' most private areas of their nation. Soon, other batches of six passed down, until only six soldiers of the initial 36 remained on the surface to guard the well-head and machines.

{ HP } --- { Unterirdisch blitzkrieg } --- { HP }

Once the full complement of thirty troopers was gathered in the tunnels, they began to systematically deploy small fumigation units that emitted a poisonous vapor toxic to anything not fully human. The soldiers didn't need the gas filter part of their masks to deal with this as they could safely breathe the gas for months before their lungs were affected. And even then, it was the build-up of oily residue not metabolized by their body that would be dangerous, not the actual effect of the poison. No, the filtration masks were to protect them from the effects of their own flash-bang grenades, the fumes from fires they would light as they retreated, and the poisons deployed by the enemies in an effort to clear out the invaders from their dwellings.

Not lighting up anything, the human troopers relied on the scriptworkes engraved in their lenses to show them the landscape and furniture in black & white outlines, with color thermal imagery and an overlay of magical events in different colors. The ear-pieces of the helmets were protected against sudden loud noises plus built-in comm-sets to speak between men without an outsider hearing anything. Their armors had been both stitched and inlaid with scriptworkes to create layers of climatic control, free-movement, stealthy movement, divination deflection and immunity versus 'human' magicks so they could cast wide-area spells without holding back due to having to protect their comrades.

On top of having a pair of professionally custom-crafted wands, each Knight of Walpurgis had a 12" dagger, a war-hatchet, a 9mm Beretta 92SB-F pistol with 20 shell magazine, an MG-3 fully automatic 7.62mm drum-fed machine-gun, several grenades and several rune-stones. Each soldier also had a riot shield made of laminated steel sheets with a small window in the top so they could see while hunkering down to throw stuff over their temporary shelter.

There were precious few goblins who had been prepared for such an incursion, let alone in the most forlorn and heavily warded zone of the bank tunnels outside of the royal district and medical blocks. Nobody wanted to break IN to a prison, they wanted out. But, in this case, what the SS troopers wanted was held captive inside the accursed zone, so they had to bust through and seize their prize to insure overall victory.

As they advanced, the storm troopers placed fumigators to clear out enemies, to balance out their chances of success against what they knew to be far superior numbers. The nazis especially feared the goblin-hounds, massive quadruped reptiles that could run twice faster than a cheetah with a jaw like a crocodile, but no tail to bother them when they jumped or dodged during a pursuit. Since the beasts were the size of a big human but with less than 2% fat on their bodies, getting into a scrape with one could severely deplete the number of soldiers coming back from the mission, hence the systematic gassing of all tunnels they could access. That this also protected them from snakes, arachnids, and the goblins themselves was just good tactics.

Besides, their target was protected from this sort of thing anyways, so why abstain?

It took almost a half hour for the SS troopers to find the proper block of the carceral zone, and then find the right cell, because they weren't marked at all. As a basic protection against escapes or intrusions, the goblins had relied on good old oral tradition being passed down from one jailer to the other to keep the place as unidentified as a farmer's corn field. It worked, but not for long as the nazis had handheld computers that were auto-mapping their movements and location based on small metallic RF-ID tags they were sticking to the walls as they moved. Plus, they opened each and every room, clearing it of any lifeform that wasn't their assigned target even if it were other prisoners. This was not a mission to find allies, so no chances were offered.

Finally, they got the good room, and the four goblin hounds standing guard before the wall of magically smelted steel were already dead from the poison gas. Two goblin soldiers were alive and somewhat healthy because of the climate bubble around their hoods. A pair of quick salvos from MG-3's took care of those subhuman pests so rapidly they never had the time to raise their own metal shields or cast spells at the enemies.

The lieutenant snapped off a smart "Zieg Heil, mien thann!" at the prisoner as the curse-breakers got to work on reducing the steel door's locks to melted slag with small doses of raw basilisk venom. A noise came from the corridor, warning of rushing goblins, but they were intercepted by the 24 storm troopers still outside the cell chamber. With great shouts of rage and gleeful abandon to the glory of Gruumsh, the goblins died in a hail of tungsten jacketed shells that had been coated in squibbing oil to facilitate punching through magically crafted or warded protections like the magical races used.

A few last hisses and swirls of toxic green fumes announced that the three locks on the cell door were destroyed. The target was acquired for the greater glory of the Hallowed Walpurgisnacht Hegemony and its sworn ecclesiastes, white humanity's Eternal Reich.

Before he could make a comment of any sort, Albus Dumbledore was grabbed by a pair of stout nazi SS soldiers and shimmied along the planned retreat as easily as if he were just a big plushy that had been won from a game at the farmers' fair. With his legs never touching the ground, it let the elderly wizard time to study his saviors and approve of what he saw. Clearly, his fifty year old plans had been followed assiduously by Gellert and his minions, just as he had programmed them to do, right after WW-II was officially ended.

Well, the fools thought it was ended, but it was just a strategic pause, the time to resupply the troops and find a better attack pattern.

Back then, there had been no prophecy, no seers and no Divine influence in Albus' life, only Power and the almight of his wand. He had made this clear when he had committed his first mind-rape and permanent hijack of a person's soul upon his accidental friend, 14 year old Gellert Grindelwald, whom he had met during a student summer job in Munich. To this day, Gellert had small segments of Albus' beard hairs, basted in his own genuine blood, implanted inside his cortex to act as if they were antennae for a radio. Dumbledore could sense him, exchange messages with him, and even perceive through his senses anywhere on Earth. This effect worked even when the felonious warlock was arrested and detained underground, beneath the powerful wards of Gringotts.

Getting daily news updates from the surface had been child's play, as had been timing the rescue mission to coincide with the moment when the goblins retreated deeper in their tunnels to avoid accidental casualties, from when the English marines invested London to retake the city. Due to the UK infantry troops very visibly massing outside the municipal limits, most of the people with a radio or TV had been apprised of the situation, fleeing or hiding according to their own abilities. The streets had been empty, so had the upper tunnels of the bank facilities, so stealing some trucks, hauling the equipment then sapping the tunnels had been relatively easy work for these hardened, professional warriors.

Besides, humans were the superior species in everything, even in muggle techniques, and this applied even to non-white races. That was why the specific word 'subhuman' was invented.

{ HP } --- { Sic Semper Tyrannis } --- { HP }

Faster than he had believed possible, Albus Dumbledore saw himself standing inside the teleportation frame, but he wasn't going to the surface of Charring Cross road like the soldiers. No, in his case the device linked with a cloaked satellite in sub-orbit, just above the cloud ceiling, and beamed him straight out of English borders, right into the outer bailey of Nurmengard Castle in the Austrian Alps. A few minutes of slow walk at the best speed his golemized clothes allowed saw him in the top-most chamber of the central keep, standing in the presence of his ex-lover and lead drug-puppet, Grindelwald.

And now this war was going to start going the way it should have, right from the beginning.

Or, he thought so until he was hit in the back by a 'magic disjunction' charm.

With all his clothes' golem enchantments immediately dispelled and the pieces falling apart, Dumbledore fell to the floor in a partially crippled heap, voiceless because the vocalizer was disabled, and wracked with pains from the shock of impacting the stones. Crawling on the floor on his left side, the elderly crone tried to look towards his attacker to whelm his powerful legilimancy upon them, but to no avail. Then his fate was sealed when a pair of muggle servants brought two pails of freshly brewed squibbing oil to douse him from head to toe. Unable to dodge the fetid liquid, the former grand sorcerer cried in hoarse, wordless misery as his one functioning eye saw the splash of light brown oil come at him. Seconds later, he could feel his magicks leaching out of his body and soul, never to return due to how powerful the recipe used had been. The follow-up splash by two more buckets was useless, but a precaution from whomever had made this dastardly decision.

Now that he was reduced to a squib for the remainder of his life, and could not be brought back to power by anything in this world, his foul betrayer showed himself.

Dressed in impeccable green wizard robes covering a slate gray muggle suit, the man had long ink-black hair that fell to his shoulders with small gray areas at the sideburns. He was clean shaven around the mouth, chin and cheeks, with small rectangular glasses that glowed from the powerful enchantments laid upon them. Behind the glass lenses glowed emerald eyes full of hate and loathing such as Albus had rarely seen in his life, unless it was his own reflection in the mirror. The man's robes had no Family crests or House sigils embroidered, and he did not show guild badges or church effigies, with even his hands being gloved in green velvet thus hiding any rings he may have worn.

"Hello Albus," the mature wizard gentleman spoke in mock friendliness, "It has been a good long decade since we have last seen each other. I suppose that would be enough time to forget about me, but I am still disappointed at the lack of recognition." He spoke with a Cambridge accent, hinting at wealth, social status and erudition beyond the usual student, more fitting of an academic or statesman. "Alas, such is my menial life," he bemoaned theatrically, fake-swooning just for the fun of baiting Albus, who recognized the gesture easily. He had used that maneuver often enough to see through it now.

Turning to the still immobile and silent Grindelwald, the unnamed man raised an odd short metal tube tipped by a carved crystal, incanting blithely "Avada Kedavra!" In a sudden flash of uranium green energy, the former Dark Lord of the Walpurgisnacht Hegemony fell dead, never uttering a single comment in his defense. None of the servants or soldiers moved to help or avenge the fallen Nazi prophet.

"Who are you?" Dumbledore demanded, betting that even without magic inside his frail body, his powerful mind would be able to manipulate the inferior cad anyways. "Tell me who is about to kill me! I have the right to know! By Pureblood wizarding law, I have the sacred right to name the Ender of my Line!"

Shaking his head in obvious amusement, the nameless man replied "You are not the End of the Dumbledore Line, I am well aware of this. Besides your older brother Aberforth who is the actual Lord of the Minor House, you have taken liberties with many young women over the last five decades. Using foul alchemies to engross them via 'syringe of force' dweomers as you were never attracted to females in your life." The man shook a scolding finger at the old sorcerer in a fake-parental way, saying mockingly "Bad Albus! Making unknowing girls pregnant to steal their Lines right on their wedding night, to deflect doubts and questions, once the child is born."

Standing well away from the man whom had wrought so much pain and shame on his life, the anonymous mastermind continued to walk in circle around the pool of squibbing oil without any fears or cares. Waving his left hand indolently, he added to his remonstrance "Besides, You know full well, dear Albus, that dead souls can be summoned from the Veil to answer questions. I do not believe it is in my best interest to give you anything to barter with for power over the living, or to tell my enemies I yet live. No, Albus, I believe that keeping you ignorant, and forever worried about my identity, will be both a useful and a cruel, but thoroughly deserved, punishment for your sins against Magyck and Life."

Aiming his metal wand, the unknown man intoned the fatidic words, smiling in utter satisfaction and relief as the old man was wreathed in a green flash, then dropped dead to the flagstones, defeated once and for all. Addressing the muggle servants, he commanded them "Get this offal to the courtyard and have the Tenebrous Pioneer make certain he's well and truly dead. Then, on confirmation, have him tilled into Nightsoil. I want no traces of this parasite to sully the Prime Material Plane anymore."

With a silent nod, the two muggle human servants grabbed the wet cadaver by the arms to drag him outside where the just summoned Small Death was awaiting its work material. The resulting Nightsoil would be moved by wheelbarrow to the recycling shed where it would be dumped into a vanishing bin, as an added safety against resurrection or divine miracles.

Looking outside by the stained glass window, the unnamed Lord let go of the stress that had cramped his back and given him a headache all night. Dumbledore was gone, and seventy years of misery were at an end. Now, all he had to do was remain hidden and discrete so he didn't make new enemies, and life would be good at long last. He had managed to hijack Nurmengard for now, but would be moving before breakfast, leaving an empty stone husk devoid of all riches and magicks as his people were busy pillaging everything they could rip out.

He planned to live in style, despite that Dumbledore stole his two magical Bloodlines when he was a child in Hogwarts. Using his muggle grand-mother's lineage to create his identity had insured nobody descended from the Welsh Wiccan sect would ever trace him. Getting the requisite riches and plot of land would be easy, given what the gormless christian fools and British Navy together had inflicted upon the Earth. As for whom he had been born as, or what his public moniker had been during the Welsh Wiccan Blood Purity War of 1975, those didn't matter anymore. These obsolete identities were dead, as was his muggle grand-father's line and title, and so were all the problems associated. He had no desire to repeat those mistakes ever again, especially since he had been programmed by Dumbledore to do them, it hadn't been his free will to act so. However, now that Britain was fully aware of the old bastard's crapulence and changes had begun to happen as they should, he felt no need to return. He would miss Hogwarts and Knockturn Alley, but he could find a decent magical district elsewhere in Europa easily enough. England was not the center of the world, no matter how much they tried to make their citizens believe it.

Whispering softly to the ether of the empty room where he stood alone, the wizard breathed out "Fare thee well, young Harry Potter. I had never meant to attack your family, but could not resist Dumbledore's mental commands. I am gladdened to see you thrive, in body, mind, magicks and society. Build us something new. Something beautiful. Something to show that the bearded mongrel was menial and useless, compared to true wizards. And fear not, child, for these old wars will not touch your world anymore."

Walking down the wide masonry stairs towards the main atrium, the green-draped wizard looked upon the large metal drums that had been spaced out on each level of the keep. More than a hundred barrels, each containing 155 gallons of liquid explosives, composed from a toxic mixture of ammonium nitrate, raw Promethium oil, several metallic oxides, and reem's blood.

Magical thermite on dragon steroids, so to speak, with magic dispelling effects on the side.

Two hours later, near 7:30am, the blast that shook the Austrian Alps was strong enough to cause a 5.3 Richter scale magnitude earthquake and trigger four different avalanches in the mountains.

Nurmengard was transformed into a vitrified crater 1,000 yards wide by 200 yards deep.

The emplacement would be contaminated and resistant to magicks for three centuries, thus making it a favorite camping ground for those who needed to get away from prying divinators and magical bounty hunters. Muggles, however, would not actually be affected by the dead zone and simply raid the shanty camp every other year, just to see what fugitives they could trawl in.

Nobody knew how or why, but not a single supporter or sympathizer of Grindelwald's political party and sectarian cult were ever found alive after that event. Only dried out skeletons that revealed they had died in the month prior to the evil fortress exploding, usually in combat or from prolonged torture. Law enforcement agencies noted a dramatic drop in neo-nazi activity on the entire planet, specifically in the muggle para-militias and sects, in the following year as the fanatic wizards manipulating them had been killed. From that point onwards, the Nazi creed never recovered its numbers or strength, slowly fading away to the trash heap of History, like so many other depravities had done before.

Winter 1992 – Presidential Fall and Rise in America

(Francis Scott Key 1814 – The Star Spangled Banner)

Friday, November 6th of 1992  
The Capitol  
Washington DC, Virginia, USA

Given how many fanatical christian followers, oathed ecclesiastes and ranking priests had lived and worked inside Washington DC since the early 1900's, it was a miracle that the British Navy hadn't decided to nuke the town off the map. Nobody knew if it was an oversight or the result of willful planning as the English armed forces weren't saying anything to anybody yet. But the fact remained that one of the biggest, most christian-oriented cities in North America, had survived the nuclear holocaust with only ground tremors and wind pattern shifts to affect its residents.

While no physical explosion had touched the city, the truly devastating effect this had on the USA was felt in the social lives of the population. Unlike many other countries that had been struck by missiles, the US still had its national government in place, and most of the elected officials were still alive to do their jobs, if they weren't drunk or stone to alleviate the stress and pain of surviving when millions didn't. Although many of these public servants no longer had a living population to represent anymore, and the geography of their state was changed forever, it meant that the federal government was still active and in charge.

The citizens in the zones of the middle and upper latitudes had breathed a sigh of relief that the national capital hadn't been incinerated, as it would make any recovery a regulated, stable process. Or, at least, from a technical perspective, the US government still worked. In the day-to-day operations of DC, very few things had changed, except that the flux of mail and emails from several hundred southern towns had stopped coming in. The reality was much more somber, and far less happy than people living outside the District of Columbia could understand.

Inside DC, there were thousands of humans who had swallowed the poison proffered by the Denarian angels, who had pressed President Bush to side with the newly revealed, miraculous sect in the hopes of bringing back their dead god, thus securing their own power and posterity. Instead, they had given foreign nations the last impetus needed to decide the USA had outlived its usefulness, and also passed beyond any bounds of decency and good taste, to the point its existence could no longer be allowed. The majority of these fanatical, hubris-driven christian devotees had been celebrating what they saw as their final victory over heathens and infidels in Washington DC when the British began to bomb their openly declared enemies, a dozen at a time.

And now, these self-styled patriarchs of religious orthodoxy, spiritual purity and white racial superiority had survived while their families, kin and allies had all died in fires worse than any Hell that had been promised to the heretics. Now, the failed pontiffs had to go on living with the knowledge of their proven guilt for the rest of their lonely lives, broken, wrecked, and forsaken by the rest of America who judged them to be the true perpetrators of the monstrosities that had befallen their nation. Nobody was surprised by the wave of suicides that struck the highest levels of the christian hierarchy that had held US politics in its iron grip since World War I had been ended by the 1918 Armistice. Fearing the emergence of riotous crowds as existed in Europe and the chance that the government could turn against them, now that their Angels were dead, many priests and church employees preferred to commit suicide. Even though self-harm and suicide were deemed to be 'mortal sins' by church doctrine, most clergy and ecclesiastes would rather have a quick, painless death than face the shame of being publicly judged by their inferiors, especially if they weren't white on top of being infidels or apostates.

It was in this context of people fleeing the federal or state capitals in droves from fear of secondary atomic strikes, economic collapse of the entire Western Alliance, and mass suicides of those who bore the responsibility for the madness and wars that a great change was committed, to remind the Peoples of the United States that they were better than all this. On a background of religious insanity and societal revolt, a few humans stood up to try and ease the suffering of the American population and Earth.

{ HP } --- { Personal honor still matters } --- { HP }

The scene on the main steps outside The Capitol Building in Washington DC was reminiscent of the old days when people actually cared about the governance of the country more than they did personal wealth and cronyism. There were tens of thousands of protesters of all walks of life gathered on the streets around the government center of the nation, waving placards and chanting everything from religious hymns to old Confederacy war songs from the 1860's.

The reason such a vast crowd had assembled in the depth of a dreary Friday morning while the city was being whipped to submission by a giant, never anticipated snow storm, was standing at the podium raised on the steps of the US government's beating heart. Today, in a gesture never seen before in the history of any country, several people would show they still had honor and dignity to offer, despite the cruel offenses done against the country.

President incumbent George Herbert Walker Bush was recently widowed, due to his wife dying from catastrophic injuries and radiation that could never have been treated, even with magic or prayers from Living Gods. She had been in the periphery of one of the atomic explosions, when visiting ailing family in Houston, in Texas. All that branch of her kin had died alongside her. The blow had been immense, and deeply personal. Too deep to heal from, or to even think he deserved to recover from it.

According to the MaC-USA (Magical Congress) divinators, President Bush was not truly guilty of treason or handing the country over to sectarian fanatics. They had scanned him and affirmed that he had been remotely brain-washed by Angelic Power, something that no mundane human could hope to resist, even if they had been assisted by sorceries and wards. When one factored in the overwhelming almight of Danael of Concord to the calculations, it was impossible to figure out why President Bush still had any humanity or autonomy left in him. The only hypothesis was that in order to mentally program tens of thousands of entities from a great distance, in a short period, the angels had cut corners round and skimped on the dose of magic needed to make certain everything was permanent.

It didn't matter for President Bush anymore.

Without his wife and extended family, the fight wasn't worth it. Telling the truth, or this version of it, in public might help keep him out of jail or worse, but it wouldn't really matter to him anymore. The US armed forces were on the brink of collapse. Several ships at sea and smaller bases located well outside of the continental US had declared themselves to be "Terrans, not puppets for extra-terrestrials", seceding from the country until it was back in Human hands, or at least being controlled by America-born earthlings. The Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff were no longer supporting the course of action laid out by the White House, just two or three briefings away from publicly refusing any further orders from the current Congress and President.

There was only one option left.

For the Greater Good of America and the Earth.

On the morning of Friday, November 6th of 1992, at 10:00am, on the steps of The Capitol in Washington DC, G. H. W. Bush, the outgoing President, publicly abandoned his reelection campaign that sought to have him hold the office for a second term. He stood somberly at the podium, without any family or friends in case fanatics or vengeful people who had lost kin in the explosions sought to attack him. He wanted no more blood on his conscience, and the risk of snipers, bombers, and now magical attacks, were just far too great to risk.

In his ten minute orison he thanked the campaign volunteers, the RNC staff and friends at the NRA who had worked tirelessly to see him go as far as he had reached. But now the time was for rallying the population, for gathering allies as much as resources, and it was painfully obvious that he was not the man do accomplish this. As such, he asked those who believed in the culture and cause of a Conservative America to vote for Ross Perot, to fend off the hordes of liberal leftists that would invade Washington and destroy all that rural, simple, middle-America had worked so hard to build and defend through two World Wars.

x----------x

Ex-President George H. W. Bush watched on the six o'clock news as his morning speech was replayed for the audience, knowing in advance it wouldn't do much to change the course of history anymore. Ross Perot may have been a good in-between choice for those who feared Bush's unbridled religiosity-as-national-rule but he had too many screws loose in the head to appeal to a large enough basin of voters to win the election. With numbers idling around 1 in 5 voters throughout the campaign, Perot hadn't yet managed to go above that invisible 20% line.

The latest polls showed that Clinton was surging ahead at break-neck speed, especially now that the deleterious effects of magic and divine miracles upon the American social system had been publicly exposed for the world to see. Perot solidified his ideological hold on his base, but had a visibly adverse effect on the other 80% of the voting public who saw him as too close to the type of religion-driven madness that had put the country at war with its oldest and staunchest Ally. And so the presidential election in a few weeks was all but decided already. Becoming a two-man race would cement Clinton's already sizable advance. Bush had been predicted to lose by a good margin in the early October polls, so now it would be worse for whoever tried to pick up the banner of conservative social values and lifestyle.

Not to mention that with the Magical Congress now unveiled, questions were rising as to why there were still two systems of government on American soil when all other countries of the planet were moving towards a single unified representational institution. This question was playing out in the media, showing how bad some nations were handling the mess, but in the USA it risked lighting up anew the racial tensions that were being put to sleep at long last. Except that now, there were brand new species by the dozens and several types of occult practices that could become targets of exclusion, bigotry or persecution from 'True Americans'.

George Bush closed the TV set, ignoring the dinner plate sitting cold on the Resolute desk, to take up his jacket, hat and gloves so he could go for a walk outside. The snow was falling harder now, and almost three feet had fallen during the day, with more coming over the week-end. The specialists on TV had warned people that this was one of the first symptoms of Climate Change brought about by the 89 nuclear explosions; a cooler temperature all year long with wetter Spring and Autumn, and longer, harsher winters. Summers would be bleary, windy things with little sunlight and occasional tornadoes all over North America from now on.

Sighing in misery and loneliness, the outgoing President walked out to the Rose Garden, fearful that soon the air itself would no longer be breathable by humans or most animals, because there was so much ash, dust and volatile chemicals floating in the atmosphere from the cities that were cremated. The fact the sun was hard to see at noon was a bad omen, but unfortunately it was just the first clear symptom of a long list of maladies the foolish humans had inflicted upon themselves.

Only Time would tell what came next, as no mere mortal knew how to predict things anymore.

Winter 1992 – Home, sweet frozen home

(Harry Potter - Theme)

Sunday, November 8th of 1992  
Mistgate Glen  
Point of Ayre, Isle of Man, The Britannic Realms

It had been a full week since the refugees from the multiple treasons of the Welsh Wiccan sect had returned to Earth. Life had gotten simpler and safer, inside the sheltered Mistgate Glen, when the Mythal Shield had been fully activated. No ash, dust, vapors or radiation from the atomic detonations entered the village anymore, allowing the residents to concentrate on their food and lodgings instead of their immediate health and welfare. This meant that the project of building a larger fishing sea-boat had been set back on the list, while attributing houses or apartments and refreshing the agricultural plots of land for planting edibles had gone to the top.

The village had standardized lot sizes at 500' x 500', along a pattern of 14 cubes wide seafront by 22 cubes inland spread. The Peverell ancestors had spent more than five thousand years clearing, cleaning, building and exploiting these 308 parcels to support their extended community and allies. All around this rectangular setup was a mile wide zone of wild environment that covered a 'U' of land, with a rectangular area of seashore and shallow coastal waters.

An ancient network of shallow and narrow, open-air canals connected more than three quarters of the plots. The waterways were barely ten feet wide, allowing only for two-man canoes to circulate, so as to have one parking lane and one traffic lane in each direction. The canals were all dug eight feet under the street level, with three feet of water depth all around the network. This allowed the Glen to build all the bridges needed to cross the canals as flat as the roads, without having to make raised-arch bridges that are uneasy to pass with oxen dragging loaded carts. The canals carried fresh soft water and did not connect to the Irish Sea, so as to keep salt water from flowing up the low-pressure system, to avoid contaminating the water that farmers use for their crops and beasts. There were however connections between the canals and the wild zone outside the village proper, and though there access to the natural streams of the Isle of Man was possible. Due to scriptworkes and votive idols, the canals didn't freeze in winter, but the streams outside the Glen's climatic cupola did, so waterway traffic was limited to inside.

The entire Glen was covered by a Mythal Shield while the inner village was covered by a second, equally strong Mythal, plus the consecrations granted by Hades to his faithful. Several temples and statues were strewn about the grid to spread blessings and salubrity, while several mana sources poured raw Magyck into the atmosphere, bolstering the wards, scriptworkes and alchemies that all buildings depended on to stay standing. The most fundamental job of the two shields was to keep the climate livable and non-toxic all year long. Presently, the newly awakened wards were busy trying to raise the temperature back to something that resembled late spring, so that the plots of farmland could be sowed and harvested, and that livestock could be sent out to pasture in the outer zone.

x----------x

Now that Harry had recovered the Lord's map from the town center, he could tell people what plots were supposed to be used for what type of work, and start allocating the people their new places in the derelict village. The child-Lord had found some three dozen familial farmsteads, eighteen mono-culture plantations, several fisheries processing buildings, industrial workshops, artisanal shops, different healer's edifices, and several clearly tagged mage houses. On top of this were all the regular houses ranging from cheap, primitive cottages up to huge, luxury mansions like the one where the burgomaster used to live. The Peverell Seat was actually placed in a building so big and complex that it was called an 'hotel particulier' because it held a mix of living quarters, offices, reception hall and restaurants with external terraces for public events. Besides the already known gate-hub on the seashore, there was also a fairy portal, an inter-dimensional fairy crystal mine, and a large graveyard, covering multiple plots, with a spirit well.

Harry had quickly assigned those who wanted one a farm, clustering them together. Then he placed the remaining few specialists in housing as close together as he could, which still left several outliers that were completely isolated. One of the conditions that Harry insisted upon was that people had to have a home separate from their working area, if possible. Given how the village was built along the traditions from thousands of years ago, that idea was soon proven to be unrealistic, as most farmsteads, boutiques and workshops had some form of lodgings included in their plot of land, if not the main edifice where the revenue-bearing activities happened. Harry changed tactics and just tried to keep from splitting family groups or friends so that they could build a sense of community, even if they were so few as of now.

This led to vivid debate, held in the gate-hub's main hall for convenience, about the usefulness and safety of accepting quickly new people to grow the Alliance's population passed the survival threshold. As it were, they had mostly adult men with a handful of women, a bunch of young teenagers, and only half of them could use any active magicks at all. Thankfully, the presence of the house-elves balanced things out in the group's favor, but just barely. The elves would help with clearing the fields and greenhouses, refreshing the ward scripts and repairing the plumbing in a jiffy, but that was pretty much it. For everything else, the poor servant creatures were in the same situation as their human families, so that couldn't be the solution to save them.

That meant that the only way to rationalize their population balance, and eventually prosper, was to actively seek out potentially useful individuals and attempt to recruit them. This portion of the debate proved acrimonious as they presently had a clear cleavage between humans and elves, with Rehz Ib Fettach being the only different species capable of speech that could be understood. The majority of the humans wanted to focus on bringing more humans to insure that any humanity at all survived the coming nuclear winter. In a rare show of logic, nobody was insisting on magical-only candidates, given how desperate the situation already was. But it was also clear that the group wanted to forge a solid sense of identity and belonging before accepting anybody that would be physically or culturally too different from the rest, specifically to avoid conflicts or the creation of new fault lines. The Glen's population already had a wide species gap between two groups, nobody saw a need to make it worse by adding more differences and frictions.

Harry declared that the Alliance heads would think on the problem and propose a plan of action to the group at large for a secondary debate. No intakes of new citizens would occur unless the being happened upon their hidden doorway by their own means, and proved harmless. The refugees accepted this decision easily, since the wards themselves would judge the person before letting them inside, allowing only those in need or at the end of their life to enter.

{ HP } --- { A place to lay my head at rest } --- { HP }

It was midday, on Sunday November 8th, that Harry Potter and his familiar finally packed his bags to leave the gate-hub and move into the antiquated Peverell seat. Having seen the huge building once during the week, he hadn't been all that keen on living there, alone and isolated from the rest of the community like a pharaoh's mummy in its pyramid. However, there were important documents, books and artifacts from his family stored in the obscenely rich building, so the boy had little choice about moving into the ghastly place.

His elf Jippsy had of course been ecstatic; all the cleaning and provisioning required to make the place livable for her master and his guests had made the poor being vibrate with glee. Not having the courage to deny her, or to get into an argument about making her ask for help from other elves either, Harry had simply asked her to get ready those areas they would be using in the coming weeks. The rest of the huge structure could wait for when all the pressing tasks had been resolved, so the daily jobs could get done without a hitch. The elf had agreed emphatically and gotten to work right then, making the human boy wonder if he would ever understand the elves or their culture for real.

Now standing in front of the massive building that bore the crest of Peverell on the front balcony over the main entrance, Harry honestly wondered what he had gotten himself into.

The edifice was composed of three segments, a central cubic block with two 'L' shaped wings that attached to the main block on each side, giving it a shape like a resting bird. The architectural style looked more evolved than what humanity knew seven centuries ago, being closer to 1700's than 1300's in aesthetics. However, Harry knew that his ancestors often prayed to Hades for inspiration, and they had traded with boats passing on the Styx River often. Having built a structure that looks like end-of-Renaissance a few hundred years ahead of the calendar was just normal for them, back in the day.

Still, the main block of the building reached easily seven storeys high at the top of its steeply pitched roof, and four full floors in the lateral wings. The building was surrounded by manicured lawns, planters, flowerbeds, small stone statues and a huge circular fountain at the front. The first two floors all around the wings and main façade were less bulky than the upper floors so as to create a system of colonnade shelters under which tables and lounge chairs were placed to let guests or relatives enjoy the outside during the warmer seasons.

On the north side of the plot passed one of the canals, a necessity to bring in from the farms and boutiques all that was necessary to make such a large edifice function at full capacity during meetings or parties. On the south side, the façade, stood a small druidic cromlech for those prayers and rituals that needed to implore the divinities of Nature and the Cosmos.

The building truly deserved to be called an 'hotel particulier'; it had clearly been designed for hosting parties, ceremonies and large Alliance gatherings throughout the year, regardless of climate. It even had been planned to cater and care for people's individual needs on a vast scale, just like a commercial hotel would do in the modern era.

According to the short visit Harry had done earlier in the week, the ground floor was actually built for commercial usages, with two bistros that had interior eating areas and external terraces, a beauty/barber salon, a small apothecary clinic, and a stationary/book shop in the main lobby.

The first floor was dedicated to public offices the House Peverell Lords, Ladies, Heirs and all the secretaries, accountants and notaries on retainer, for when they needed to conduct their daily affairs without requiring the bureaucrats in the town center. This had the benefit of separating the flow of traffic, and making sure only those with genuine Family business came inside.

The second floor throughout the structure had the best windows and balconies in the entire building, therefore it was reserved for the Family and important guests. The Peverell lived in the left wing, the guests stayed in the right wing, and they had common rooms in the main block, including a wide reception room that had a grand balcony overlooking the fountain on the front terrace, and the cromlech.

The third floor was reserved for the permanent servants of the House, and they lodged in both wings, but not in the middle. From the third floor upwards, the central block was reserved for the Lords of Peverell, including a vast library, a series of small armored workshops, and a private salon for intimate meetings.

The last two floors under the gabled roof of the main edifice were reserved for the Family's private chapel of Hades, where they enacted their Blood-Law rituals and divinations to guide their kindred towards a more prosperous future.

Harry knew that the building also had two deep underground levels.

The first basement held all the usual provisions and reserves for the daily upkeep of everybody who lived full-time in the edifice. It took a lot of food, hygiene products and linens to make a manor this size work well. The first basement also had three fully covered docks that each allowed two canoes to park side by side, and a pair of covered colonnade piers directly on the side of the canal for quick deliveries, or dropping off a messenger that didn't need a return trip.

The second basement was much older than the rest of the structure, and housed the bigger, more protected workshops for truly dangerous alchemical experiments or ancient rituals. It was also here that was located the cell block for those members of the Titled Family's main line that were brought in for judgment over crimes against their Blood-Law. Those found guilty of the worse offenses had their punishments applied in the cromlech at the front of the building.

{ HP } --- { This is what we are } --- { HP }

Harry stood before the vast structure that would now define his life, his magic and his mindset until the day he died, looking slowly over every detail of the ornate, neo-gothic architecture. The thin and tall stained glass panes, the tall varnished oak doors, the masonry balconies and myriad gargoyles perched on the gutters and roof gables, it all spoke to something buried deeply in his psyche, resonating in the 'Blood Compact' left to him in heritage by his distant ancestors.

Placing a hesitant gloved hand on the cold stone pillar of the cromlech, Harry pushed his will and magic into the menhir, offering his Blood-Tithe and life for the protection of this domain, so that his ancient Lineage could thrive anew. The child received a feeling of warmth and welcome, emanating from deep within the Laand, somewhere between the layers of dirt, rock, water and the energy weaves that composed material reality.

The Spirit of the Peverell clanhold had accepted him as its Lord Protector.

The cromlech shook, making the thick layer of snow and ice shift and drop, sloughing off to unveil the circular prehistoric rock formation, its 17 porticoes and central reflection pool becoming hot from all the magicks being channeled as the terrain awakened. The aura of warmth and life spread outwards from the pool of bubbling water, turning the snow and frost to light white steam that floated idly in the noon-time sunlight. The warmth made the grass push out of the thawing ground, the bushes burgeon with flower buds and small critters awaken from hibernation. Soon, the wave of magical warmth and life passed beyond the Peverell hotel's limits to suffuse through the surrounding plots, moving steadily for hours until all the village had been embalmed in the restorative aura.

Harry didn't wait more than a few minutes before walking into the main lobby of the great seat of his rebirthed Power. He looked curiously at the windows of the stationary shop, smiling at the writing tools, blank parchments and world maps lying still on the shelves, ready to be claimed and used by eager hands. He wondered if, not having known of her own honorable ancestors, Hermione might not have become the shopkeeper here. This seemed exactly the sort of thing she had wanted, a year ago when she entered the wizarding world. To dispense knowledge openly, or give people the means to make their voice heard directly in the seat of Power that managed the Glens. To publish their opinions so the population could understand all perspectives before any debate that could change the governance of their communities.

Trailing his gloved fingers over the wooden railings set at an adult's hip height, he walked upstairs, to the first floor where he had to find the Lord's office to complete the claim on the edifice and the Mistgate Glen, before he could name a burgomaster to manage things in his stead as he went out exploring the other enclaves. Besides, Harry could not concentrate on his studies and self-improvement if he was swamped in governance and business tasks all day. He was just twelve years old, and still had a lot of studying to do, even if Hogwarts was out of commission for the predictable future, and no other formal schooling institute could help him anymore.

Finding the office was simplicity itself as Jippsy had already changed the nameplate on the door and cast Blue-Bell flames in the sconces around the room. She had even set some logs to burn in the cast iron stove, leaving the firebox doors open because she knew how much living flames helped Harry to calm and center his mind when he was distraught or anxious. Everything had been dusted, cleaned, and the oak wood pieces had been polished back to a glossy shine, with the brown cow leather upholstery getting mended and refreshed.

Walking to the large metal stove, Harry cast a sanctified cantrip on his hand, making a pearl of blood leave his finger to coat the sigil on his Peverell sigil ring. Once the crest had changed color, he thrust that hand into the cheerfully blazing flames, activating the secured fire-gate so he could pass safely into the secret keystone room located deep beneath the building.

x----------x

Harry emerged from the masonry hearth in the ward room with Rehz perched on his shoulder as always. It was a good thing he had kept his winter trenchcoat as the temperature in here was well below freezing, as attested by the layer of hoarfrost coating everything in sight. The only way to completely set himself as the new Lord Peverell over Gretna's Blessed Green Glens was to offer his own blood, magicks and life to the small altar in this room. This was the 'master plug' for the entire network, and the reason why his ancestors could not build more than 7 new glens at each generation, and the total number of enclaves was fixed as well.

The antiquated druidic altar was carved out of a dragon's leg bone, the flared joint in fact, to make the connection with the Earth and Magyck that much more natural and potent. All around the rough flared collar of the altar's table surface were inset shiny black stones, magical gems that served to channel the negative and spiritual energies proper to Hadean rituals. Each small piece of luminescent rock was naturally shaped like a bare humanoid skull, with empty eyes and pointy teeth, but no lower jaw. These were aptly named 'skullstone' by gemologists and were worth several dozen Lorne each, which made the seventeen jewels set in the altar a veritable fortune in dark-themed 'bling'.

The child placed both hands atop the table, just like countless generations of his ancestors had done, offering his blood, magicks, life, mind and soul for the good and posterity of the lineage, to make sure the House of Peverell had another chance to live and thrive. A feeling of warmth, love and acceptance flushed his entire being as the voices of thousands of souls resounded through his being, anchoring in his mind and soul that he had in fact been chosen willfully, and chosen well, by all that had come before him.

The short ritual done, Harry and Rehz returned to the office via the fire-gate, being welcomed by Jippsy who offered them a light lunch as they recovered from the virtual freezer they had endured for the final attunement. Sitting at his new desk, Harry enjoyed a simple turkey sandwich with a salad and cake, with some piping hot tea to help get some heat back in his stiff body and bluish skin.

As the young boy ate, he looked through the drawers and shelves, finding bits and pieces of the paperwork the last Lord Peverell had left behind when he closed the glens. None of it had any importance today, but it was interesting to read how certain crafts or trades were done, back in those long-ago days of peaceful bliss. Well, the important part would come after the meal. Harry had found the large safe hidden behind the magical portrait mounted over the hearth's mantle. He would need to open that to get the last few keys and papers to understand what exactly was missing to make this community work.

Winter 1992 – You are crunchy and taste good with poison

(Harry Potter - Theme)

Monday, November 9th of 1992  
Gringotts Bank  
London, England, The Britannic Realms

Ragnok, 471st king of the British Goblins was in a royal snit. He ignored the clomping pace of his escorts as he strode powerfully towards his goal, his feet fueled by a rage that bordered on the unholy wrath of daemons from the Pits that lay in the bowels of Hell Everburning. The bloody security & investigations department could have waited till breakfast was finished, at least, but noooo! They sent him an urgent missive on the emergency crystal system right as he was putting his lips to his first cup of tea!

Who in all of England does that?

Interrupt an honest, hard working goblin's cup of tea!

BEFORE the sixth morning bell, no less!

There were whipping posts going unused inside this realm if this was the kind of sloppy service his officers thought they could inflict upon his august personage! They had better have some damn good explanations for this depravity, or they would be shoveling dragon shit in the lower mines! He would keep them at it until they reached retirement age, whence they would become food for the wyrms involved, to become hot steaming shit in their own turn!

Finally, the aging monarch reached the central offices of the investigative branch of his army, where all the crimes and accidents that happened in their nation were analyzed and resolved for the betterment of their people and allies. The heavy double doors made of alchemic mithril alloy were protected by a pair of armored trolls who glared at the king as if he were an utter stranger they had never seen before. It wasn't because they were idiots or uneducated, far from that as the ensign bars on their uniforms told clearly, but the escape of Dumbledore four days back had badly shaken the entire British country, not just the goblin species. The fact that it was some fanatics from the new generation of supporters for Grindelwald's perfidious creed that did the attack had damaged the confidence and stability of the militaries in multiple parts of Europa. And thus the trolls also looked poorly upon any who dared to darken their entryway, no matter what rank or social status they may have.

It did good to Ragnok's old heart to see such gratuitous aggressivity in his ranks. Like all of the governors of the nation, he had spent quite a few sleepless nights recently, and relations with the humans all over Britain, Europa, Slavia and Russia were now strained badly. Unfortunately, his pleas for patience while several countries did their investigations were getting some rather nasty push-back from the higher echelons of his own government. There were very strong growlings about the need to whelm the armies of the other non-human nations to eradicate the Grindelwald mess once and for all. The stupid flat-skins having three dark lords in the same century was really pushing the last nerve of even the most patient citizens of several species at this point. At least the bloody Fae were staying out of their mess, for the time being. Nobody wanted the pointy-eared dust sprayers to get in the mix; it was bad enough without that happening, too.

Entering the reception lobby of the department, the irate king ignored the saluting sentries and dispatchers, marching straight to the local elevator to go down two floors, to the division in charge of making divinations upon the soul stones of deceased clients and criminals to insure that they were truly and finally dead. Given the involvement of at least one Hadean cleric in this unholy mess, by the courtesy of Lord Potter, Ragnok didn't think he was paranoid to have the stone linked to Albus Dumbledore divined and placed under surveillance after he died.

Arriving in the soul magicks division, the fuming monarch aimed his steps directly to the head of the forensics team that was tasked with finding what had happened to Dumbledore. The officer looked up from his workbench when he heard the footsteps of his king and retinue, far noisier than the department soldiers' usual booted tread.

"My king, welcome to our humble abode," the military officer greeted formally as he stood from his swivel stool, to salute his leader.

Sneering in seething anger, Ragnok bypassed all but the most basic of politeness as he waved off the salutations as a waste of his time. "Why have you summoned me at such an ungodly hour of the morning? I hadn't even whetted my lips on my cup when the crystal panel came alive with your message. This had better be important, or I'll see you acquainted with the dragons in their dens before the breakfast hour is over!"

Pointing a clawed finger at the thick granite tabletop, the specialist soldier explained "It is the soul stone of the criminal, Albus Dumbledore. Four days ago, upon his escape, the stone became inert to indicate he had died. Immediately, the keepers for the Hall of Stones brought this to our attention, and our diviners accomplished their rituals to verify the truth of things. At the time, the team of forensic analysts had declared that the old man was truly dead."

"What of it?" Ragnok asked, impatiently. "From what I see, the bloody pebble is still as dark as wet coal chunks. Why did you bother me? To discuss the different tones of black in this piece of mining spoils? We both know that soul stones are nothing but ordinary sedimentary rock with a few runes and spells to tie them to the individual clients or visitors. They have no marketable value and no inherent magicks."

Nodding vigorously, the lieutenant-commander agreed "And that is the gist of the problem, my king. No inherent magick of their own, and so the stone of a dead man should remain unlit for eternity. But! At exactly 05:00am this morning, this particular soul stone, which had been arbitrated as connected to a dead man, glowed again for a period of exactly 127 minutes. Then it went dark again, and hasn't shown any signs of magical, spiritual or alchemical activity since." The soldier scratched at his scarred cheek with a long clawed index thoughtfully as he finished his eerie tale.

Frowning most mightily, Ragnok was in a bad spot. Ever since the death of Harruda Winesour, events of an esoteric or occult nature had multiplied like Plague Rats in a charnel pit full of still juicy corpses. And this was not something he wanted to hear about, especially not after the successful escape from the convict who was tied to this stone marker. They had lost twenty goblin-hounds and nearly forty soldiers that day, plus a few dogs and guardian spiders too. It was a dark day for their nation, and a bleeding lesion on the honor of their military forces. The only good part of it had been Dumbledore's quick, proven death just after he got free.

Directing curious eyes to his specialist, the king asked "Are you anywhere near determining how the prisoner's original death occurred, just after his escape? I thought the diviners would have finished with those rituals by now."

Waving an idle hand towards the same tabletop, the senior officer replied blithely "We just got the draft version of the report during the night. I was about to read through it, to know the finer details before having it clean-copied for the governors' meeting, later this week. They surmised that something had dispelled or interfered with the magicks in his golemized clothes, then he was squibbed permanently, as shown by these glyphs here that burned out when it happened." The officer pointed out the appropriate glyphs on the soul stone for his king to see. "The dweomers in these ancient sigils are finicky, and react only when the person tied to the stone looses certain Realms of Power before dying. The human was fully squibbed and then killed right after, with almost no delay between events."

"So, whomever got him out didn't want to save him. He didn't die of stress on his aging sickly body because the escape was too rough for his endurance. He died because he was neutralized and executed. Someone was tying-up the loose ends in the judicial process that the current planetary events had made us unable to finish tidying-up ourselves."

Again, the soldier nodded. "It is the conclusion that our diviners and forensics crew had come to, until this morning's odd occurrence. The diviners are not able to look into it right away. The civil war going on topside has killed off so many thousands of magical humans that they are all doing overtime on the wartime client death follow-ups. And that doesn't even include all the heredity claims that will have to be processed to avoid frauds from cast-out or unrelated persons trying to grab a piece of a dying House's assets before they get declared 'Ended without Issue'. It could be weeks before any of the regular military diviners are available, and rested enough for their magic to give any pertinent results."

Sighing in misery as he knew where this was leading, Ragnok passed a weary hand over his ridged brow, cursing the day that bearded wanker had been born to humanity. "Fine. We need answers, and we can't risk any delays in this case. Have all the file and materials given to the new Haruspex. She can put her hands in this swill, to see if she's got the mind and magicks for the job for real."

Ragnok turned around and walked out of the laboratories, out of the department, and marched himself right to the nearest small bistro for a quick meal before going up to the wartime offices that watched over the surface areas near the bank building. He would put this strange event out of his mind, never thinking about it again in his life, as it would never be mentioned again.

{ HP } --- { Rehashing old history } --- { HP }

In 1945, at the close of the Second World War, the grand sorcerer Albus Dumbledore enacted the first part of his "Warlock Emperor" plan. His old friend and one-time lover from his early adolescence had wreaked enough havoc, panic and damages upon the muggle and magical societies of Britannia, Europa, Slavia and Russia that he could now be retired from service.

And so, Dumbledore faked a grandiose duel with Gellert Grindelwald in front of several hundred witnesses of multiple species and faiths. He won the fight in terms of magical erudition, sheer Power, endurance, and several political symbols to browbeat his philosophical opponents.

He used more spells than Gellert, casting in more foreign languages as he knew more dweomers from countries and species that Grindelwald would never consider 'good enough' to learn from.

He could cast spells at a higher Power, purer polarity and better synthonized frequency than Gellert ever could as his ex-lover was a professional fighter, not a scholar of magical theory.

Technically, Grindelwald was better trained in the combative arts, especially in the calisthenics and acrobatics necessary for full-on warfare. Albus had trained in formal dueling techniques in his youth as it was still taught at Hogwarts, but nothing similar since. No, Albus used mental commands to limit what his old friend could do, how he demonstrated his skills, and how long the fight would last, so that Dumbledore need not use body-boost spells or potions. By remote controlling his puppet 'live' during the fight, the felon made it look spectacular without ever breaking a sweat.

It was at the end of the duel that Albus played the biggest symbolic and political trump cards that had stacked the deck with. He had found and bound the fire phoenix Fawkes several years earlier, when he started working in Hogwarts. He manipulated the holy bird to appear and float above him for the Grande Finale, then spit fireballs at his enemy. He chanted a spell in ancient Pictish dialect to summon six unicorns to serve as his flanking defenses. In reality, the holy equines had been puppetized by drugs and imperius curses, then had a permanent portkey spelled into their horns. The bird and horses created a seven-pointed 'Cone of Purification' around Albus to very spectacularly spread out a wave of golden holy energy, thus disrupting Gellert's internal magicks and knocking him out long enough for Dumbledore to summon his wand, claiming publicly that he had finally 'liberated' the Death Stick, when in fact he had mastered the wand nearly two decades earlier. Then Albus used the Death Stick and his original wand side-by-side to double-cast a foreign spell to make Grindelwald disappear in an explosion of gold light. In reality, it was a simple illusion timed to coincide with a portkey implanted inside the other man.

The world thought Grindelwald was dead, just as Albus wanted them to.

Later on, Albus would pose for the international medias, with his new Relic wand at hand, phoenix familiar on his shoulder and unicorn guards surrounding him, claiming for the first time on record that he was the "Lord of Wizarding Light" and champion of goodness for the entire planet. Like dominoes, the moments of his career fell in line, timed to the clock only he knew about. Professor, war hero, deputy headmaster, warlock in the Gamot, headmaster, delegate of Britain in the ICW, chief warlock of Britain, and finally, Supreme Mugwump of the ICW.

The "Warlock Emperor" had ascended and ruled unseen, as nobody ever called him such.

It was following this faked win over Grindelwald that Albus deployed the part of his plan that nobody ever thought that he would contemplate. Having always given a public façade of being repulsed by death and killing despite his great ease at the act, Dumbledore interned Gellert in the depths of Nurmengard Citadel, then sending the recently graduated Thomas Marvolo Riddle Jr to serve as his apprentice. Together, the two researched the highest levels of necromancy, soul magicks and biomancy. It was from Grindelwald that Riddle learned about horcruxes and crafted his war-persona as Lord Voldemort, under the orders and remote guidance of Dumbledore.

And among the many projects the two wizards worked on for Dumbledore was a method of immortality far cleaner, and less murderous, than the horcrux ritual or phylactery of liches. They developed the 'Albus-Spore', an artificially crafted body of living flesh that carried an alchemical clone of his cerebral engrams and spiritual matrix. Essentially, as the name says, it was a fungus shaped like a miniature version of Dumbledore, like an evil mini-fairy or garden gnome of Hell.

Because it was technically alive and autonomous, Albus had his drugged puppets keep the spore in a stasis vault for a few years, deep under Nurmengard. Then, during the Welsh Wiccan Blood Purity War of 1975, he secretly moved the mushroom of malevolence to a different location without ever telling anybody about his nefarious contingency plan. Following the planned, and well executed, public end of Voldemort, Albus moved his resurrection fungus again, to its final storage place, from which it would emerge if he died.

{ HP } --- { An awakening, of sorts... } --- { HP }

After close to 47 years spent in hibernation, the small fungus shaped like Albus opened its eyes and looked around the world it had never known existed. It took several minutes for the powerful mind to fully engage and the plant-mind to be subsumed by the humanoid conscience as the full resurrection process engaged. After ten minutes of inactivity to get used to its environment, the diminutive Dumbledore look-alike jumped out of the vat full of green slimy water and toddled its way across the empty chamber towards the exit. The bearded mushroom slowly pushed the large stone blocks that were the keys to a combination lock crafted in the druidic tradition to unlock its hiding place.

The vessel of Dumbledore's soul emerged from a vegetation covered hillock, the high point of a small island in the highly mystical watershed basin of the Dnieper River, about 30 kilometers south of Kiev, in the Ukraine. This place was so replete with wildlife, incredibly magical plants and animals of otherworldly origins, that only human wizards born and raised in the area could survive for longer than a short caravan trip through the zones not settled by the muggles. The island had changed very little in the decade the fungal doppelganger had been hidden in the empty, artificial hillock.

Standing naked in the dawn light, the mushroom knew that to obtain the last days of life his original had lived would take a ritual. The only way to retrieve the memories remotely from the Soul Jar hidden in a different location would require that the mushroom clear out and purify the small cromlech that was built in the hollow, at the base of the dead, empty tree that served as the access tunnel for the underground stasis vault. The animated vegetal was only a foot tall so climbing down from the knobby, rotting tree was not that easy. And since he was naked yet, any scrapes and bruises he got were ignominious on top of being painful.

After a good half-hour of climbing down, the gnome-like fungus reached its goal, a three foot tall and five foot wide arrangement of 12 menhirs that looked more like discarded mine spoils than a willingly build structure that served a purpose. It took another few minutes and low-power spells to clean the area of vegetation and forest debris. As the humanoid mushroom worked, it failed to notice the silent approach of a predator it didn't know lived on the island.

{ HP } --- { Four-legged pest } --- { HP }

Like in many places of the world, even the Dnieper River basin was not an environment that was welcoming to lycans, weres, wessen and shape-changers in general. From the old superstitions of Fae who appeared human but were in fact cannibalistic beasts, to the tales of werewolves hidden in farming villages to prey on the weak, to the insidious daemons who took possession of your loved ones to rape and murder you, nobody trusted beings who could alter their face and body. Not even in the wild, highly mystical, uncivilized zones that comprised the Dnieper's shores and hundreds of tiny, unwelcoming islands.

So it was that a lonely were, chased out of his small farming community when his affliction was discovered, had come to live on this forsaken island. He thought for many moons that he was the sole sentient inhabitant. Having been lonely all his life since he was barely seven years old when he escaped the rabid villagers, the male had precious little culture to begin with. Having spent the better part of the last 22 years in his animal form as a coping mechanism against the weather, the other animals, and the loneliness of the island, he had never managed to evolve much. So while the small mushroom might look humanoid and intelligent to most people, to the weak eyes and feeble mind of the forlorn were it looked only as if another sprite from the other worlds had come to make trouble for his poor, lonely self.

Approaching in his animal form, the were-goat willed his long shaggy fur to stay the same shades of dirty white as the snow encrusted vegetation and rock formations around them. He stalked his diminutive prey easily, his noises, odors and vibrations dampened by spells he had painstakingly developed by himself over the years. Opening wide a jaw filled with thick, chisel shaped teeth, the omnivorous being plunged down on the unsuspecting replicant, snapping his jaws so hard that the head, arms and upper torso were sheared off in a single, messy bite. After chewing a few times and swallowing, the were-goat swooped down to scoop up the pelvis and legs in another disgustingly messy chow.

The were-goat stood immobile on its four stubby, hoofed legs, now visible since its meal was sitting comfortably in the pit of its stomach. In fact, it felt so good to have eaten that mushroom that it decided to revert back to its human shape for a short period. Looking at the weird stones placed in a crude circle at the foot of the dead, gnarled tree, the were shrugged it off as just another thing nature did. He was dressed in primitive rawhide boots, a crude rawhide kilt, and overlarge fur coat, since he had never learned to make clothing in his life. He kept no tools as he had never brought any when he fled, and never been taught to build any in childhood. Instead he piled up a few branches of deadfall and prayed to the Old Gods to light his life. The wood came alive with flames, the cheery red fire livening up the hollow with warmth and light.

As the were-goat sat himself on a stone he had cleared of snow, he began to experience severe pains inside his abdomen. A few minutes more had him on all fours, vomiting green bilious fluid that was laced with brackish blood and gobbets of rotted flesh. Minutes more and his body's last defensive mechanism engaged automatically, trying to transform him back into a woolly mountain goat so that the change of shape would remove the poison or illness, and repair any damages he had incurred while human. Instead, the morpheic acids in his cells actually capacited the reaction, increasing the speed and strength of the ongoing processes.

In a series of wet splashes and noisy creaks of breaking bones, his body reshaped itself just like during a regular change, but he became something else entirely. His face grew an incredibly long beard and bushy eyebrows as the features rearranged into those of a full-sized, non-vegetal Albus Dumbledore. The body jerked upwards, achieving standing stance after a few tries, the legs and arms gaining their proper length, the torso becoming less fat but keeping the hard, lean muscles that had belonged to the were. After a few more minutes of agony, the change was finished and a hybrid, part-human, part-plant, were-goat Dumbledore stood amongst the material world.

{ HP } --- { The gnashing and grinding of teeth } --- { HP }

A few flourishes of an empty hand transfigured the primitive rawhide garments into flamboyant purple silk and fur robes, cut in the style favored by British wizards for three centuries. Now dressed in his usual resplendent regalia of the Wizengamot and ICW Assembly, the reborn Dumbledore mutant gazed around the wintry desolation of the truly uninhabited island. Passing a thoughtful hand through the magnificent beard that had been the visual sign of his age, endurance and wisdom since he had been fifty years old, the resurrected grand sorcerer gazed upon what would be the diving board from which he would sally forth to conquer the world.

The criminal mage slowly turned the facts of the last few weeks in his powerful mind, admitting that the discrete method he had used to control people had been efficient, right until he began to fall for charades, false prophecies, and tried to turn magical thinking entities into mere puppets, like those in the street amusements for peasants. If he had not given into his penchant for playing people like pawns on a gameboard, if he had not abandoned himself to basking in the glory of his own intellect over all others, his original plan could be salvageable. However, after all that had been done to the Earth, the nuclear explosions, the polluted fallout, the climatic changes happening, and the implication of the Sidhe Courts to boot, nothing could save his plan.

The muggles and their planetary, high-speed communications through radio, television and the newly built Internet meant that everybody knew about the magical worlds, the planes of existence, and the thousands of species that had been hidden for millenia. Now that everybody was paranoid about being mind-raped, possessed, drugged out of their wits, or have remote control implants put into them, Albus could not even risk hijacking a muggle simpleton from a vagrant camp or prison. The chances of discovery and subsequent hunt were just too great.

As the self-proclaimed 'most powerful warlock of the Human World' stood immobile near the small camp fire, reflecting on passed glories and mistakes, a very fleeting, ghostly shadow passed high overhead. Dumbledore's finely tuned survival instincts made him turn around with both hands in the air, already forming a two-layer defensive shield against the unseen enemy he had finally perceived.

It did nothing to stop what happened next.

Dumbledore's thorax exploded outwards in a shower of blood, rent flesh and bone fragments that sprayed a good ten feet in front of him. A wide, long, smooth stinger made of solid ivory was protruding a good three feet outward from his destroyed chest. Along the sides of the stinger were small holes that leached out a steady flow of venom so powerful it smelled worse than a dead skunk, and so caustic it could be heard to bubble nastily as it polluted the very air, soil, snow, and all else it touched.

As the last wisp of consciousness and life escaped from his corpse, Albus saw the air around the small clearing shimmering when a cloaking spell was released, revealing a massive reptilian creature that was thirty feet high at the shoulder joint and nearly three hundred feet long from the fanged snout to the end of its tail, where the poisonous stinger was located.

Poison Drake.

A non-noble yet imminently magical and highly intelligent entity. So called because it had a scorpion-like stinger on its tail-end, glands that produced venom at the base of each claw on all four legs, and all the spikes along the spiky mane that ornated the back of its main body were slick with another caustic fluid. It also had venom glands in the mouth that allowed it to spit streams of venom like a cobra through the four canine teeth, up to two hundred feet away in a straight line. Its breath-weapon was a cloud of corrosive, neurotoxic, oily mist that made basilisk venom seem as innocent as pond scum. While usually found in tropical swamps or tempered forests near lakes and rivers, poison drakes were a lot smaller than the silver and copper dragons that most legends were based on. However, they made up for their smaller stature by a cleverness and cunning that most ninja assassins would envy, a bevy of poisons that should have them declared as moving environmental disasters, and enough occult might to match any human wizard or priest without effort.

Rare was the lucky fool that encountered a poison drake and survived if it turned violent.

And just like for a human biochemist or biomancer, it would not be a clean resolution. The contaminations, pollutions and sporulations resulting from any fight would be felt in the locale and participants for years after all was said and done.

{ HP } --- { Toxic relationship } --- { HP }

The fully mature creature raised its tail without any real effort, hoisting the limply hanging cadaver up and closer to its snout for a quick sniff, to determine if it could be eaten. Switching from ordinary vision to the 'True Sight' that was inborn to all true magical dragon-kind, the entity inspected the new catch to insure it had no poisons, disease or magical traps lying in wait.

The air shimmered, revealing a much smaller version of the green and brown mottled adult, who moved a bit to expose the find to its progeny. The adult female expressed herself in the ancient Drakonesque Dialect, explaining the actions to her male offspring.

"Come closer Ilresh, and watch mommy do," the large dragon told its child. "You see how the body is covered in those colored things? That wasn't very intelligent of this creature to be so visibly colored in winter, when everything is white from snow and ice. And making a fire in the open, where anybody could see it, smell the smoke or feel the heat from afar. Not bright at all."

The prepubescent male replied with the sarcasm that parents of ten year old kids anywhere could recognize; "Not to mention letting all that bloody offal bake on the rocks, letting out that smell! Was he trying to bait something, or just not used to hunting in the wilds? Cuz he sure made it clear that he was present, and had nobody around to help him."

Shrugging indolently with the assurance of a creature that had survived for more than 1,400 years against all odds that Nature and the civilizations around had thrown at her, the mother replied blithely. "If I had wanted his reasons, I would have approached him in a different form, or used a long-distance 'Sending' dweomer to communicate. However -somebody- had a hole in his gut and kept on begging me for a quick snack, as we moved around to avoid that blasted energized ash that falls from the sky every now and then. If you wanted to speak with him to get news of the world, you shouldn't have tetched so much during our flight."

Gesturing with a clawed, hand-like and very agile paw, the mother ordered tersely "Now prepare him correctly. You can't digest those clothes and tools, so you have to take them off. Carefully now! There could be treasures for barter in them. And books! We need more books to learn the tongues of the world and get more spells to protect our new nest, when we find a good spot. So, clean off the clothes, then shave off the hair because that's useless too, and give him a good sniff another time, just to be sure he's not trapped."

The male poison drake rolled his eyes slowly and exaggeratedly in that manner of children who already know stuff, and cast an 'Unseen Servant' spell to remove the cadaver from his mother's stinger. The dragons had learned long ago that the best way to avoid getting caught by corpses that had been trapped or contaminated by parasites was to have the inert magical construct do the dirty scullery work for them, dealing only with the clean end-product. The reptile child verbally ordered the invisible golem of raw magical energy, getting the layers of cloth and tools away from the edible flesh for later inspection. To date, it all looked like quickly transformed stuff that would revert back to pure energy in a few hours, so nothing worth keeping anyways. The body was then subjected to the same sort of charm that shepherds used to shear their sheep, another old trick that dragons had learned but normally employed on minotaurs, fauns, satyrs and weres to remove any chance of getting 'dimensional fur' full of crap stuck in their throat.

The mother watched lovingly as the growing boy grabbed the naked, shaved cadaver with an eager hand, and its own tail tip with the other. Shaking the stinger like a bottle of vinegar, the child spread a generous drizzle of venom all over the dead human, all the while licking his lips at the delicious smell of raw meat being seasoned by natural poison.

"Go ahead child," the mother crooned as she carded her huge clawed paw around the stiff short horns atop his head, "Give it a good splash. You'll see! Everything tastes better with poison."

The child agreed vehemently as he crunched the meaty body of the hybrid part-human, never knowing who or what he had just eaten. He did as his mother instructed, chewing at least eight times to truly break the hard bones and separate the limbs from the main body so he didn't choke because something solid or too wide hadn't passed down in a fluid manner. Barely a minute later, the boy dragon was smiling a happy, toothy smile of contentment as his belly now had warm meat inside. He could fly for a good dozen hours until his next feeding.

As her last surviving child ate, Anaresh reminisced of her mate and their two other children, all of whom had been killed by those mongrel humans in the name of their gods that didn't even exist, or had died long ago.

Her mate Vilitesh had been shot down by an American F-14 airplane over the sands of Iraq, near Bajid on the Tigris river. The pilots were christian fanatics that claimed over their radios that he was the Serpent of Eden come to tempt humanity anew and it was their sacred duty to purge him out of the world. She had cast 'instant rust' spells at all three jets, making the planes fall apart in mid-flight, letting the pilots die when the fell without anything to save them.

Her other son, Tilesh, was walking in drachin shape in a bazaar, in the lake town of Karahan on the shore of Van Golu in Turkey, when he got shot in the back by drunken monster hunters who wanted trophies to barter in the shops for more booze. He was murdered foully, and nobody did anything to get her family justice because the World War was more important, and "they weren't humans anyways, just beasts", so she moved on with her two remaining children. Like millions of refugees from this blasted war, her family just kept on moving, never looking back. The damned town had so many people milling around that she hadn't even been able to find the bastards to avenge her dead child, a fact she still wept for every night.

Her daughter Gamaresh was been killed in the Black Sea town of Varna, in Bulgaria. Shot by muslim fanatics carrying RPG's, claiming the winged demon was sent by Allah as a test of their resilience against western evils and spawns of Hell. Again, she had been denied vengeance when a huge riotous crowd of humans had gathered around the fanatics to celebrate their kill, the imams using the occasion to declare a Fatwa against all wyrms and serpents. So the two surviving poison drakes had fled, cloaked so thoroughly that nothing could perceive them, but still they fled like the weak, defenseless refugees that they truly were, no matter how big, powerful and poisonous their natural shapes were.

Raw muscle and venom can't compete with cannons and missiles.

Now that Ilresh was done with settling his meal, the pair took to the air, the mother's two hundred feet wingspan being joined by the seventy feet of her child, the two enacting magical cloaking spells that were taught in their lineage for several hundred generations. No mere muggle radar or pitiful human sorceries would detect them under these powerful draconomantic shields. A few hours more and they would reach Kiev city proper, a great hub of magicks, alchemies and gates to other worlds. There, they would hide amongst the thronging hordes of sentients that were trying to survive the consequences of the muggles' folly against Gaia. In a few weeks, they would know enough to decide if they stayed, or left the planet altogether to find a safer living space elsewhere.

Winter 1992 – Britannia Imperia

(Thomas Arne, 1740 - Rule Britannia)

Tuesday, November 10th of 1992  
Buckingham Palace  
London, England, The Britannic Realms

The Palace was positively crawling with camouflage garbed marines and normal uniformed infantry for the last three days straight. The EOD (Explosives & Ordinance Disposal) teams had been through the building once at each separate day, because now that they knew about magic and teleportation spells, nobody could think a place was safe for more than a few hours. Now at least, they had beastmasters who could speak with the dogs, cats and birds to get better results when smelling out threats or hidden traitors.

Each team of sentry or EOD had at least one spiritually trained professional, be it sorcery, faith, alchemy, mentalism or pure psionics. The other thing that was visible to everybody was the presence of entities that weren't humans mixed into the corps of troops. From afar, the shapes were humanoid enough to not matter, except for the few abnormally tall or wide individuals. Seen from up close, tusks, horns, claws and rugged, leathery skins could be discerned as orcs, ogrin and trogs became personally identifiable units. Here and there, the lithe shape of a noble elf could be seen, quickly marching through the patrols to refresh Blessings and make certain none of their soldiers had been hijacked or replaced by nefarious beings.

Floating balefully in the great entry hall of Buckingham, above the heads and stations of everything in sight that did not bear Royal Blood or a Peerage of the Realms, gazed mercilessly the thirteen occult eyes of a beholder-mage. Negotiated at a high price and given insurances for his rights as a newly admitted British citizen, the Eye-Tyrant had been hired as central manager for the Palace edifices and grounds. Floating six feet above even the tallest ogrin hybrid, the round body with a huge fanged maw and wide central eye was draped in richly jeweled ocher silk robes, from which his crown of twelve eye-tentacles emerged, snaking, peering, gazing and judging all that they could view.

No spies would find mercy in the thirteen cold, calculating glares of the beholder.

Bolted solidly to the vaulted ceiling above its spherical body was a new system, a collaboration between the goblins and British armed services' Signals & Comms division. Twelve crystal panels linked to both mundane electronics and magical heuristics cores that served as the central data hub for the floating manager's constant, unwavering stares. Each panel had the capacities of a battleship's main computer, and each of the actual servers placed farther, on the floor so that regular troops could maintain them, could match all of the CCTV and traffic computers of London pooled together.

Nobody would be getting in or out of Buckingham Palace unbidden.

{ HP } --- { Hail to the queen! } --- { HP }

At precisely 10:00am, the palace's frontal courtyard was cleared of all obstacles, with the military personnel taking up extra surveillance posts along the fences and roof-lines. Sniper rifles were joined by staves and crossbows, while even the most mundane soldier now had runic scripts on their blades and bullets to give them a chance against magical threats. Likewise, their base clothes and uniforms had been stitched with runes and steeped in oils to reinforce them against weather, fire, acids, poisons and hard damages. It didn't come up to a quarter of what smithed mithril armor plates could endure, but it was still about twenty times better than kevlar or ceramic shock-plates built the muggle way.

In the clear space in front of the palace main doors appeared a twenty foot wide by forty foot tall panel of pure energy, solid blue with crackling pinkish bolts running along the outer edges. From within the depths of magic emerged an eight wheeled IFV (Infantry Fighting Vehicle) followed by another, then a long black limousine, and then two more IFV's. Once the convoy was arrived, the gateway was closed to forbid any unwanted passage from occurring.

The soldiers from the four IFV's disembarked, all 48 troops wearing heavier body armor and weapons than the usual marines. These were the Crown's Mechanized Rodders, a small but powerfully trained group of specialized combat mages who excelled in both modern martial arts and occult warfare. Each was recognized by the combination weapon they carried; the bow-caster. It was a combination of a 12 gauge shotgun with a crossbow system mounted on top, a thick oak rod attached on each side, and a permanent alchemic silver bayonet at the front. The telescope sights enabled ranges up to 2,500 yards, as the mechanical and magical boosters in the guns gave them the capacity to match any not-amplified sniper rifle sold on the market. Plus, a thin bronze frame circled the four combined muzzles of the weapon, serving as anchor for a storm shield and all-purpose riot shield to deflect weather and attacks away from the user. The Rodders wore body armor made of synthetic canvas uniform, which was covered by alchemically smithed titanium-magnesium alloy plates, with similar boots, gloves and helmet. Each man also had a large rectangular riot-police shield made of crystal inlaid with Ember scriptworks.

Surrounded by her praetorian guards in public for the first time ever, Dame Elizabeth II, the Lady Windsor, Queen of England, stepped out of the long limousine with her husband, prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh. The royal couple wore red armored vestments and ceremonial jewelry so heavily enchanted that it glowed stronger than the bleak winter morning light.

The couple slowly ascended the grand stairs up to the main entrance, passing by a pair of smirking minotaurs wearing British SAS field uniforms. Nobody knew what secrets the Horned Ones were keeping from the rest of the armies, but they did seem quite amused by what they knew. And really, with enough dimensional space in their fur to hide a Dreadnought-class destroyer, nobody would really be sure what the damned, flea-bitten creatures were hiding. Even less people would want to know, since it might very well impact their sanity, or see them disappear inside the 'furry domain', along with the other secrets nobody knew about.

The queen and her husband walked through the twin lines of heavily armored infantry that were standing on either side of the corridor as honor guard, the Crown's Mechanized Rodders following them in a 4 wide by 8 long patterned phalanx. The two royals stopped just ten feet in front of the low-floating beholder, his fifteen feet wide mass of chitin, teeth and eyes creating a veritable wall of unfettered Powers and malevolence that warped the air around him. Squinting his main eye balefully, the Occular Oppressor gave no hint of being impressed by the relics of Faith or the mighty sorcerous artifacts borne by the human pair. He had seen, or even crafted, far worse in his seven centuries of existence, deep in the radioactive caverns of the Underdark. The floating manager peered magically and spiritually at the two persons, confirming their identities and that they were free of external influences. Then he opened his vast mouth and extended his tongue, pulling from a dimensionally dilated gland a purely electronic RFID tag scanner that also had a camera to scan fingerprints. Having finished confirming that the royal couple were in fact themselves, the beholder-mage rose up to his usual altitude, clearing the passage as he swallowed the scanner anew, until next time it was needed. He looked genuinely displeased that no rampaging violence would happen, if you could read his flattened features at all.

The royal couple marched slowly to the throne room where a full setup of cameras and sound equipment had been installed by the Military Intelligence Division-6 (MI-6) signals & codes specialists. The spies were ready to broadcast live the queen's address to the British people, and the many worlds the signal could reach accidentally by extension.

{ HP } --- { We shall prevail } --- { HP }

It was 10:30am when the two reigning monarchs of Britain sat on their thrones, bedecked in the ceremonial regalia of the Empire, to inform their people on the state of the kingdom and Realms.

Queen Elizabeth II sat in her armored ocher robes, the dark gray metal segments flexing ominously as she moved to hold sheaves of white paper before her stern gaze, to read the orison she had prepared for the event. The massive, ancient, Crown of Albion sat upon her head, the antiquated sculpted style of the drab gray silver band and figures lending her a somber, angry appearance as she gazed into the camera lens over her small reading glasses.

(God Save the Queen)

"My dear fellow citizens of the United Kingdoms of Britain, the colonies and Commonwealth, I bid thee a good day, on this most auspicious of moments. We, Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of Gaia, our Mother Earth, yet live amongst you to deliver our guidance and protection, as was the ancient covenant between our ancestors and the Divines who blessed us, here in Albion."

"Take heart, good fellows of England, Scotland, Ireland, and our other territories, for We have not delved into the Anathema of Magyck, nor shall we ever debase our Blood-Law to such. Those poor things that died so cruelly at the hands of beknaved traitors and foreign mercenaries were but clones, enchanted to attract enemies of the Crown and Nation away from Us. Whilst the curs lay siege to Dover's walls, we were safely sheltered at Balmoral, away from easy access or mass transports. Those 'Celestial' beings that attempted to mentally corrupt our good citizens, to rape the souls of our soldiers, were so thoroughly deflected by our defenses that they had to send paid minions into blind fights to have any hope to find us. And they never did."

"Once We realized the full esoteric might of those arrayed against Britain, we could no longer sit in silence, hoping that these tantrums of popular distemperment were only civil unrest that would resolve itself, once the equilibrium between religious and civil life was returned. The external manipulations by these 'Angelic' entities guaranteed that no human of Earth, even the most erudite mages or faithful priests of differing creeds, could ever resist this psychic effluvium. We needed to cut the threat at the very source which fed the pipes bringing the poison into our homes. It was with a heavy heart, and great doubts as to our own rights and legitimacy to commit such acts, that we decided to plot our course through the choppy waters of a nuclear war."

"This was not a decision made simply for the survival of House Windsor, nor that of the United Kingdom as a political and economical body. We did not let the old sin of hubris that had made England such a burden upon the face of the Earth, for the last four centuries, come into play anew, as we knew well the Dark Path it would lead us into, if we were not self-aware of our own motivations and reasoning. No; it was a thoughtful, sober, and regretful, logic that made Us decide that sending out 89 missiles bearing fires worse than those of a volcano was the only solution for all our species to move forward, united and without fear."

"As I have said, the enemies of England had 'Celestials' leading them. These otherworldly beings could remotely access the minds of individuals to plant kernels of 'Faith' and 'Loyalty' to silently convert them into Denarian sect devotees. Pushed by the virulent screed of their mortal priests and the ever growing greed of the ecclesiastic caste that served as the working-arm of the churches, it could have taken only a few weeks for these 'Angels' to forcibly break the minds of millions, turning them into something akin to, yet far lesser, than the Borg from the American television series Star Trek. The most fundamental question We asked Ourselves and our soldiers was 'Would you prefer to live in artificial religious bliss, or die with your own free mind?'. And so having received a clear answer, We took upon Ourselves the authority, and the perfidy, of waging War to keep the Earth free from those that would stand as Overlords above us."

"This day, We who are Britannia, come to tell you, the peoples of England, Scotland, Ireland, our other territories and Commonwealth, that We would repeat this decision anew. Just as we have repelled the hordes of enspelled slaves and paid mercenaries, we would again do what We must to deflect and repel the unearthly Powers of such entities from our Souls. And if We must descend into the debauchery of nuclear or biological warfare to insure the sovereignty of Our kingdom and allies, then so We shall wield fire such that even the Gods have learned to fear."

(Thomas Arne, 1740 - Rule Britannia)

"And now, We shall discuss the state of our Realms Britannic. As of this morning, the national capital of London has been recovered from the clutches of the vile foreign mercenaries and religious fanatics that had tried to secede from Our hallowed crown. This liberation was helped along by the ancient and glorious siege wards of the Noble Houses that dwell within the county limits of London's greater metropolitan area. Several thousand paid minions found their slow, cruel deaths at the gates of those loyal to England, thus cutting by more than two-thirds the total number of enemies that Our Royal Marines had to hunt. Likewise, multitudes of petty criminals that were illegally set free from the municipal goals had rioted, looted, raped and murdered, during their illegitimate furloughs have either died during the hunt, or from execution when their newer crimes were found out. In any and all cases, the crime of escaping from prison during a time of war is subject to martial law, and capital execution, so these persons only ever had one end in sight, regardless."

"With London back in lawful hands, We have moved to rebuild the multi-species Albion Alliance that has endured since the raising of Hogwarts, in the year 1,000 of the current calendar. We have successfully renegotiated with the goblins of Gringotts, the dwarves of Scotland, the halflings of Ireland, the Noble Elves of Albion, and several small groups too clannish or small to have any formal governing structures. As well, We have retained the services of several private military companies to solidify Our grasp upon the divide between mundane, magical, spiritual and dimensional matters and persons. It is the sincere wish of the House of Windsor that any being, from any stratum of the Earth or connective planes, be made welcome as all diplomats, tourists or potential migrants normally are. Not to mention that after the atomic explosions, Our small island country needs all the help anyone will be kind enough to offer. We should not be so close-minded, nor ill-mannered, as to uncouthly spurn such assistance when it is presented Us."

"Pursuant to the safety of the Laands of Britannia, We are officially reinstating the Sheriffs in each county of Our kingdom and colonies. Each town council shall proceed to the nomination by merits of a list of five postulants that shall be forwarded to the Home Secretary no later than the 20th of December, before the Yule season festivals begin. All Sheriffs will be appointed before the end of January 1993, upon which each shall receive Royal Warrant to raise, train and upkeep a townsfolk militia composed of the civilians, ages 14 to 34 from any gender or species, that are permanent residents of their jurisdiction. These civilians shall be treated and remunerated as being part-time volunteers for our British Infantry Reserves, assigned to homeland defense. Each Sheriffs shall also receive a Royal Warrant to raise, train and upkeep a conscripted force made of all those without gainful employment for more than six full consecutive months. They shall be treated as full-time Active British Infantry servicemen until they find a civilian employ outside of the military services, for which they must demonstrate proof of hiring, and notarized attendance records for more than six months or be remanded back into service."

"Given the distasteful circumstances of the ongoing planetary war, and the nuclear winter that is slowly devolving across our poor Earth, We find Ourselves in the obligation to maintain martial laws for several more months. It shall probably be the end of June 1993 before we revise this. As such, the civilian police is directed to follow the directives and leadership of the military police and MI branches as stipulated in the War Measures Act of 1992, as per the brochures distributed to each precinct and council when these events began to unfold. Please do note that from now until told otherwise, any crimes of stealing from public & governmental buildings, arson, rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping for any reasons whatsoever, now all warrant the death penalty. Furthermore, as Magyck is now revealed to all, We mandate that truth serum and truth oaths be administered in all tribunals of the nation, be the matters private or public, civilian or military, commercial or penal, it matters not; truth shall be the rule of Our Law in Our English kingdom."

"Unfortunately, this brings us to a most displeasing subject, made further distasteful by the climate of warfare and ignominious betrayal that plagues Our nation so. Due to the innumerable beings that have died, many children of varying ages are now orphaned, with no living relatives, or sometimes those that We would not wish to have children in trust. As such, We are creating new law for our Realms. We shall establish a series of new residential schools that shall house both genders of all species side-by-side as the necessities of their biologies permit. While these young souls shall live most of their daily lives in the institution assigned, they shall also be attributed a sponsoring family that they shall visit several times per year, to socialize and speak of any problems they have that the schools could not resolve."

"It is Our fervent desire that such an 'open' boarding system will prevent the cruel depravities that have haunted many of our ancient schools for so many centuries. Likewise, each child of these institutions shall be taken twice per year for a mandatory medical maintenance visit at the local public hospital, and their records be made available to both the departments of health and education, to insure nothing is amiss. The building and staffing of these schools shall be a long and arduous endeavor, but the situation of these children will deteriorate quite rapidly if our nation does not begin the project now, or sets it aside as too expensive or problematic to be practical. This is not only a question of taking kids out of the streets, it is a moral imperative to house and teach them properly the ways of English citizenship so that they not drown in criminality or self-harm. That this process could eventually yield a bigger, stronger crop of persons to fill the jobs being vacated by war deaths, illnesses, old age and planned retirements, is simply a beneficial effect that We shall not reject."

(God Save the Queen)

"My good Englishmen, fellow citizens of all genders and species, of all faiths and creeds, We thank you for having granted Us the hospitality of your homes for our Address to the Nation. This is by no means the only such discourse that shall occur in the coming months, but it covered the most pressing matters. You should consult your local newspapers for the weekly updates of laws and war time protocols, as well as the posting of opened jobs in the many levels of Our public works and military contractors. Our national armies, navies and air forces are, of course, always ready to receive able-bodied volunteers, and their recruitment centers will now have longer hours to answer your questions about serving our great nation in a direct manner."

"This period of difficulty is not the end. It is a transition between two major epochs, between two existential paradigms as the mundane Earthly culture and Planar magical culture make contact and mix together, at long last. It will be an era of great tumult, yes, but also of great discoveries, of exploration, of evolution, and perhaps even of new friendships. No matter the changing climate or epidemics, large conflicts or petty crimes, We shall never surrender!"

"We are the Britannic Realms, colonies and Commonwealth, and We shall always prevail!"

(Thomas Arne, 1740 - Rule Britannia)

The MI-6 agents gestured that the live feed was now cut and the signal given back to the private broadcasting companies to start up the segment where their in-house pundits and experts took apart the Crown Discourse to explain its details to the populace. Elizabeth II thought the words had been very simply laid out, but even with good schooling and stable parents, some persons just didn't get very lucky when Mother Nature handed out personality attributes.

Walking out of the throne room with her husband, the elderly royal couple once again walked beneath the floating beholder-mage, who still seemed put-out that no bloodshed had occurred within sight of his many, merciless pupils. As the queen passed abreast of the two SAS minotaurs, she saw that both were now frowning most mightily while one of the human marines officers was counting platinum coins with great relish on his features. Deciding to ignore the rather obvious settling of wagers between the ranks (supposed to be illegal), the royals instead kept on looking ahead towards their parked convoy.

Wasting no time in view of the tall buildings around Buckingham Palace where snipers or worse could lair in wait, the Crown's Mechanized Rodders got their monarchs into the limousine and back through a new sorcerous gate inside of three minutes flat, as per convoy protocols. All that was left now was the population's reaction, but the queen would be safe in Balmoral for that.

Winter 1992 – Neville's unspoken pains

(Adrian Von Ziegler – Innocence)

Wednesday, November 11th of 1992  
Mistgate Glen  
Point of Ayre, Isle of Man, The Britannic Realms

The chubby blond boy stood swathed in his winter coat and gear, gazing at the small stone monument he had crafted with his own hands, finally able to let flow the tears he had held back for so many weeks. Lovingly, he caressed the engraved text with his bare fingers, committing them to memory, just as he did when carving them two days ago.

"Here lies at peace Trevor Longbottom"  
"1990-92"

"Marsh Toad, Loyal familiar of Neville Longbottom  
"Bound as per the Old Ways of Mystra, Mother of Magyck"

"May he prosper in the verdant swamps of Gaia"

Passing a bare, shaking hand over his eyes to try again to dry his tears, the twelve year old boy sighed in sadness, forlorn at the loss of his good companion. The poor toad had never asked to be hurt and maligned such, but the debased bastard Algernon Croaker wanted to hurt the heir of his eternal rival, Francis Longbottom, despite that the man was long dead and passed being affected by what was done.

Neville sighed miserably again as he turned away from the small grave site, raising his head to see that he was not alone anymore. His god-brother Harry Potter stood silently about ten feet away, the dragonnet familiar on his shoulder as usual. Rhez was gazing at him in that unfathomably deep stare that only true dragons exhibit, just as if he were two hundred feet long instead of the measly 24 inches that was his natural state. Harry wore an expression on his face that Neville had never thought he would ever see on the other boy in this life.

Genuine empathy.

Not the fake stuff that he fed the adults when they held a meeting in the town center or Peverell hotel particulier, nor the pleasant yet purely cosmetic expressions he showed to anybody during everyday activities.

No, this was a truly heartfelt emotion of sadness and sympathy for his pain.

Neville honestly didn't know how to react to this situation. Harry was never this open about his feelings on any subjects, or at least not with humans. With his dragonnet and elves, yes, or with the animated portraits in his mother's trunk while he had it, but not with ordinary humans. It just wasn't the type of life that Harry had experienced, he was never comfortable enough with people to be so free of himself to display his thoughts or emotions like that.

"Hello Neville," the younger male spoke softly, "Please receive my condolences for your loss. Poor Trevor did not deserve what happened to him, and neither did you."

"I agree," Rhez Ib Fettach confirmed, speaking directly to another human for a rare time. "It was not your fault that Trevor was killed so foully. That decision belongs only to Algernon Croaker, and also your grand-mother Augusta who knew but did nothing to defend you."

Nodding, Neville replied in low tones "She's dead. Augusta, I mean. As Lord of Longbottom I have a set of small jewels with a soul stone for each member of the House set into them. A few weeks ago, Aggie's stone went dark. I don't know how she died, only that she did."

Humming pensively, Harry commented "That's a good thing, then. It means she isn't out there with her pet he-whore, planning to do stuff behind your back to hurt you again. And, it also means you don't have to find her to finish the job yourself. A twelve year old kid shouldn't have that burden on his shoulders. I did, for a while, and I can tell you that it's not something you're missing out on."

Hissing softly, Rhez asked gently "How did it happen?"

Neville swallowed passed a hard lump in his throat, water leaking from his eyes again, as he answered. "It was a few weeks after we had returned home from the end of Hogwarts'. I had just finished the ritual to bond Trevor to me as my familiar when Algernon started shouting his head off all over the house. Apparently, Augusta had just received my grades for first year, and they proved that I was a fully magical, active wizard instead of the un-Powered squib she had accused me of being all my life. She thought the new teachers had faked my grades to pander to the new Lord of the House, so she bitched at Croaker and he..."

Neville took a deep breath, continuing with more determination "Well, he went berserk. There's some really bad blood between the Longbottom and Croaker for the last fifty-odd years, ever since Aggie was forced to marry grand-pa Francis instead of going with Algernon who was pining after her real hard. So, the rabid cur came at me with his wand, thinking that I wouldn't be able to defend myself against a real wizard because I'm so obviously just a cheating squib."

Looking into the horizon, towards the inland of Isle of Man, the child-Lord whispered "We fought with spells. Yes, it was pretty one-sided because I was an untrained kid and he used to work as an Unspeakable in the Department of Mysteries, but I held up my side good. Especially when I pulled out my shillelagh and dagger instead of using a regular wand. Croaker never thought he'd see a friggin lightning bolt from that close in his life, but he sure did! And I'm the bloke that sent it at him!"

Turning towards his god-brother, Neville whispered harshly "And that was when he realized that his usual bullying methods wouldn't work anymore. Thanks to the good classes from the teachers and the training you helped me with that year, I wasn't afraid of stinging, slapping, punching or whipping hexes anymore. And I actually dared to fire back right at his ugly, criminal face, too!"

Bowing his head towards the small, sober gravestone, Neville choked back a sob as he finished "That's when the bastard changed tactics. He cursed Trevor with the Cruciatus, and the backlash went up the familiar bond because it wasn't finished setting properly. We both fell to the ground, writhing in Gaia-awful pains. Then Croaker AK'ed Trevor, right a foot in front of my nose, and after that he put back his wand to beat on me with his hands and feet. Because you taught me how, I was able to use the 'Childish' spell-lists to conjure an energy blade to damage his ankle and lower leg on the first kick, and send some ball-bearing shots at his crotch. He got so scared that I wouldn't stay down and submissive that he's the one that ran away in fear, like the backstabbing coward he always was. I picked up Trevor, got some meds, and left."

Harry nodded sagely, commenting gently "I had wondered, all those weeks ago, where Trevor was hidden, when I went to recover you from that gay brothel. I had guessed that something bad had happened when Rhez confirmed that he couldn't smell the toad's odor on you."

Shrugging in fake nonchalance, the forlorn boy explained "He was dead and well passed pain, so I simply put him in stasis and shrunk him, to keep him safe until I could find a place where he would enjoy sleeping. He'll be near me, here."

Harry nodded, as he looked at the location Neville had chosen to inhabit. It was in the north-west quadrant of the village, built as a generalist healer's house. The structure was composed of a two level rectangular body with a rounded, one-level annex on the side. It looked like a European church due to the architectural style and finishing touches, but it had always been used as a healer's home and clinic. Fitting for Neville's personal tastes, the plot of land had several raised planters shaped with cut & dressed stone blocks, ready to grow herbs, spices and drugs. The other determining factors for choosing this plot of land was that it was surrounded by farmsteads that raised vegetables and livestock, and there was a canal that wrapped around three sides of the property, so access to fresh water and people was very easy all year long.

Neville had buried Trevor near the canal, to have the view and sounds of flowing water, and the smells of both plants and animals from the nearby farms. It was a good place, with a discrete headstone and thoughtful words.

Calling forth his Battlestaff, Harry invoked the vestments of his Faith, garbing himself in the robes of penultimate blackness that no living soul shall ever divine, and retrieved from his pocket the shrunken portable altar he had inherited from Bishop Gloutnay. It was time to celebrate the life and memories of a dear departed friend, that his soul may journey onto Hades in peace.

As he lit the white, grey and black tapers of funeral ceremony, Harry whispered lovingly "In the name of Gaia that gifted you life, I invoke Hades, guide of souls, patron of the Mirrors of Truth, guardian of the Grand Passage of Beyond, to escort you upon the Styx, that you may reach Hallowed Nepenthe and find your place amongst the honored dead. May you know peace and solace as you travel between the veils. May you be judged equitably amongst your ancestors. May you be gifted absolution of the errors of the living, and be ushered into the Light of the Grand Passage, and the Beyond."

Neville was crying silently, rubbing at his eyes as he tried to understand the significance of what his god-brother had done, so he was incredibly stunned when he felt a wave of Power pass through the small patch of grass by the shore of the canal. The eldritch breeze carried a gentle croaking that echoed in his mind as if Trevor were sitting in his hands again, gifting him his love and strength one more time, and forever more.

"The Great Gate of Reality has opened, and the departed soul is welcome into felicity. As we stand witness to this miracle of Nature's true purity, we intone: In Sanctum Nomine Hades, Id Mote Est." Harry gently prayed, a small, discrete smile on his lips as he received and accepted the blessings of his deity, to pass onto his depressed friend.

Winter 1992 – The drearier side of human wizard-kind

(Adrian Von Ziegler – The Sealed Kingdom)

Thursday, November 12th of 1992  
Kiev  
The Dnieper River, Ukraine

The female poison drake Anaresh and her young son Ilresh had finally managed to arrive in Kiev, late Monday evening. Finding the magical districts of Kiev had been easy given how many they were, and how big they had been built, compared to other cities of the world. Then again, the town had been built on a nexus of five Ley Lines that made the entire Dnieper River one of the most mystical, and most wildly savage, zones of the Earth's geography.

Anaresh and her son used innate dragon magic to take human form and walk around the less affluent districts, occasionally stopping to renew personal wards and cloaking spells as they both remembered how their kin had been murdered in urban settings recently. Neither let anything show they were dragon-kin, or any less than full human. Even in this cesspit of a town that many nations had fought to control over the millenia, humanocentric bigotry and violence were clearly present for all to see.

In fact, there was bigotry against several races of humans, as any who weren't caucasian white learned all too soon, and speaking anything but Ukrainian, Russian or Hungarian. Any beings using English, French or German languages were immediately seen as suspect, given what happened during World Wars I and II, and the following Cold War. Anybody who looked or sounded the least little bit like an American or NATO citizen was basically gambling their life if they walked alone in magical Kiev, even in broad daylight.

Anaresh had not wasted time in realizing what kind of cesspit Kiev truly was.

On the muggle side of the divide, the touristic areas were clean and welcoming, offering an Old Europe style that pleased the Western or Asian visitors but had little to do with the inhabitants' daily lives. The regular civilian areas where the normal people lived had been rebuilt so many times due to all the wars that they didn't look like any specific style or epoch anymore. Each person or commerce rebuilt as they could pay for, and there was little done in terms of standardizing architecture or aesthetics. Still, despite some racial or cultural frictions that could be seen sometimes, the mundane side was much better to live in, no matter how much hostility towards foreigners they might encounter.

The magical side was so old, antiquated in fact, and dirty from the continuing usage of beast-drawn carriages, and bringing still breathing livestock to the markets every morning and evening, that the streets never truly cleaned up from the dung or smell. It was even worse near the merchant plazas where food markets clustered, tightly packed against each other. There were rivulets of reddish, brackish water running in the open-air stone canals in the middle of the cobbled streets, just as if the Dark Ages had never ended.

There were cast iron cages hung three storeys high from the street lamps to hold prisoners sentenced to public flogging and shaming for minor or moderate offenses. Several gallows raised atop stone platforms still had dead corpses dangling from ropes, and moaning, semi-conscious prisoners were mounted on execution wheels or slowly bleeding in iron maidens. On one forlorn public plaza was located a great steel bull with a bonfire underneath, between its four thick legs, so as to bake alive a condemned being inside its metallic belly, like a giant oven. Occasionally, a chain-gang, directed by sorcerers mounted on horses, could be seen trying to clean the streets, fountains and benches, from the layer of perpetual, oily grime that stained everything outdoors.

The magical civilians were surly, indocile and weary of everything around them, and the vendors only accepted money after testing it with spells to detect forgeries, or portkey charms that would send the money back to the buyer after a few hours had passed. The ways to shaft a merchant with magic were nearly limitless, as were the ways to defraud a customer, hence why those making purchases also tested what they bought whenever they could do so. A few aurors walked around the public markets, looking even more worn-out and uninviting than the town itself.

Winter 1992 – Fighting for survival

(Adrian Von Ziegler – Never Back Down)

Friday, November 13th of 1992  
Mistgate Glen  
Point of Ayre, Isle of Man, The Britannic Realms

There was an unfortunately forgotten reality about reactivating the climate control functions inside the Mistgate Glen; it wasn't just the inoffensive plants that thawed out. Several types of small vermin and a few larger predators were soon poking their noses around the abandoned village, trekking out of the mile-wide band of wild lands that surrounded the glen. Initially kept to have some meat, hide and bones to work with, many of the animals had spent the last seven centuries building up their populations and improving the overall health of their individuals, since they no longer had to contend with trappers, hunters, or the weird pollutions made by artisans and alchemists in the hamlet.

Thus it was that on that most fateful of days on the Gregorian calendar, Friday the 13th, a large animal of unknown origins or abilities was perceived to deambulate around the central boulevard that went south to north, all the way up to the Gate-Hub building. The creature had supposedly climbed out of the canal near the central part of the village, where several fruit terraces were being put back in service by the house-elves so that everybody have a bit of variety in their diet.

The creature was said to be mostly horizontal, lumbering on six arced clawed legs, with a long tail and huge head with a wickedly fanged maw. It was also rumored to have many eyes and some sort of mass on its back, that seemed to move and ruffle every now and then. Some said it was reptilian, others that it was a mutated fish, but nobody got a good clear look at it yet. The damned thing was supposed to be close to thirty feet long and dark mottled green, but had an uncanny aptitude for hiding itself from prying gazes.

Given that there were few true combatants in the group, Harry used the house-elves to ferry messages and people out of the open farms and workshops and back inside the Gate-hub or town center until the threat was assessed and passed.

{ HP } --- { Let's try some teamwork } --- { HP }

Amelia Bones was never so happy to find herself walking elbow-to-elbow with Lucius Malfoy in her life. If anyone in their group besides herself knew how to dispense combat damages and death with good effect, it was the former Death Eater. Lucius had acquired a nasty reputation during the Blood Purity War of 1975 for being amongst the most concise and expedient fighters in the service of Voldemort.

Instead of playing with his prey like a cat with a mouse, Lucius always extracted the information via Imperius then AK'ed the victim without further fanfare. Any of the dark wizards that doubted his inner darkness because he didn't rejoice in torture and humiliation quickly wound up as house-guest of the Malfoy Manor, in the third basement dungeons. The Dark Lord having been invited to a few revels in said dungeons, he had never gainsaid whatever the Lord Malfoy decided as reprisals when his loyalty or darkness were challenged, so that ended all those rumors right quick.

Under normal circumstances, Amelia would have been incensed to be put in the same team as Lucius, because they had been mortal enemies during the war. The fact that Dumbledore's secrets came to light showing that everybody on all sides had been his drug puppets did change her views, and those of many. A lot of Lord and Lady Malfoy's actions made sense, now that it was known they had been mentally enslaved like the rest of the eight preceding generations. Most of all, his courtesy towards Harry Potter and willing acceptance of the boy as new Lord Black, when everybody thought he'd have the child killed to usurp the Title and House. If the man had never been inclined towards criminality or treason from birth, then only Dumbledore's potions would have pushed him to it, something that would have reversed itself immediately when the old crone had been crippled, or when the doses could no longer be applied.

It was all food for thought, Amelia understood. Nobody in their small community would be able to set aside all they had suffered or done with any ease. While a few had been truly evil and enjoyed it, those who had been drugged were traumatized because they had acted against their natures and still remembered everything done. If she were honest, Amelia herself had done a few things in combat or interrogation that she should never have contemplated, but after her brother and husband had died she had changed badly.

{ HP } --- { A mighty Growwwrrr! was heard } --- { HP }

All of Amelia's internal musings were rudely interrupted by the inhuman growl that had sounded all around them, proudly warning them that something powerful and indomitable had arrived.

Or so it seemed, until Ranek burst out in laughter as he pointed at a diminutive vivid red frog that was gazing at them indolently from a rock, partially hidden in the grassy side of the canal.

"Ah! Would you look at that!" the young adult exclaimed happily as he went to kneel close to the small bactracian. "These things were supposed to be extinct generations ago!"

Narcissa Malfoy pursed her lips in a snobby moue of disgust at the glistening oily thing that was now aiming its lurid yellow eyes right at her, as if it wanted to jump at her or use its tongue to steal her House Black silver sigil necklace. As if sensing her animosity, the small frog inhaled deeply, the two airbags under its mouth extending slightly, not giving any indication of what would happen next.

"Growwwrrr!"

The miniature frog croaked mightily, the unearthly sound being loud enough to rattle the bones and organs of every entity that heard it, and even the plank siding and timber frames of the closest houses.

"Oooh! It's a 'Grande Gueule' fresh water frog! Nobody has seen any in ages!" Old Lord Nott was all agog before the diminutive amphibian, waxing poetic about its white spots and glassy yellow eyes, while Ranek smirked playfully behind the man's back. Amelia and Lucius were not particularly interested in ecology or animals, even those that survived extinction, as they were presently chasing after something that could be the cause of their own demise if left unchecked.

For its part, the poor frog seemed to care little for all the attention. It's powerful shriek was supposed to deter predators from approaching by making it sound like a much larger and nastier animal was loitering around, not make it cute and funny. This was not how things worked! Giving off a minor but incredibly dismissive croak, the red skinned frog jumped into the canal, swimming away to its burrow for some tranquility. Hopefully, the foolish two-legs wouldn't come to bother her anymore.

{ HP } --- { Welcome to your doom! } --- { HP }

"You shouldn't have done that. I wanted that shrieker for my soup cauldron." cackled an elderly voice full of gleeful malevolence from behind the five human adults.

Turning around, all four could see a very tall humanoid shape, draped in swathes of black and brown robes that left only the face and hands visible. The being under the crassy, stinking clothes looked marginally human, if you could accept bluish skin covered in discolored disease pocks and sores, with crooked broken teeth, stringy long white hair and four inch long finger nails. The being was beyond twelve feet tall because she was standing on what seemed to be magically animated wooden legs, or jointed stilts, that didn't seem all that stable, nor all that well maintained.

"Oooh! Is that a Bracken Witch? Truly the old things we keep finding in this glen are beyond wondrous!" old Cantankerous Nott exulted aloud in wonderment.

He was answered by a sudden curse to the face that somehow rebounded off into the sky instead of flattening his skull into a mushy pancake on contact, but he had never been a very good fighter so he was unable to answer the attack right away, needing to get his bearings back first.

"Ah ah ah ah! You'll be so much more tasty after I tenderize you! Forget the frogs, I'm getting some red meat in my pot today!" the witch cackled happily as she cast a wide area poison cloud to stun them with nausea and psychedelic effects. Besides, that particular toxin always seasoned the meat just so... And it helped to preserve it for weeks, too!

Without further warning, Lucius Malfoy pulled his wand from his serpent-head cane and triggered the dagger blade to extend from the stick-tip as back-up weapon for his left hand. He immediately cast a dark cutter at the witch's wooden legs, hoping to knock her out by dropping her to the just recently thawed dirt. He pursed his lips in annoyance as the cutter's arc seemed to form three distinct channels around the wooden limbs to pass by without harming them.

Amelia's wand was in motion in the quarter-second after the witch's first curse had been cast, letting fly with a series of stunners, bludgeonners and finishing with a curse that emulated the explosion of a muggle shrapnel grenade right next to the enemy's torso. All of her energy spells were deflected or absorbed, but the physical damages from the grenade's shockwave and stone bits hit hard, making the Bracken Witch scream in surprise at the painful jolts and wounds.

Before Ranek, who had precious few spells to his name, and Lord Nott could intervene, the enemy waved her hands in wide spiral motions, spreading outwards a black cloud of brackish air that stank from 25 feet away, even before it reached its intended targets.

Recognizing the foul witchcraft for what it was, Lord Nott shouted "Plague Cloud! The Black Death has been unleashed! Make walls of fire or send any type of living flames at it! We must make it combust before it touches anything to spread the disease!" The old wizard joined his wand to his words, casting an 'aura of immolation' around himself, Narcissa and Ranek, shielding all three to give them time to deploy further countermeasures.

Lucius decided to play coy, as he used to do when he was caught in the smaller side-alleys of Diagon District by vagabonds after his purse, casting a bevvy of Blue-Bell flames that he promptly enlarged and animated to float after the Plague Cloud's effluves, to either burn cleanly or slowly dispel the magic of the cursed mist, making it curable by muggle means. His elegant, and very politely 'light' oriented solution was joined by a thunderous blast from the 'Monocle of Doom' as Amelia finally disposed with the introduction small-talk to get into the crux of things. However, the enemy manifested an eerie green sigil on the ground around her wooden feet that created an instantaneous deflection barrier, bouncing the Monocle's terrible beam of devastation up into the sky harmlessly.

The Bracken Witch then howled in evil glee as she suddenly 'fumated' by turning herself into a cloud of chocking black miasma that merged with the Plague Cloud and moved around randomly before she materialized in a new position, some forty feet on the side of her original emplacement. From this new place, the diseased harridan moved her arms crudely, throwing forth two sprays of rotten bone shards, covered in grime and molds that promised infections and misery along with the deep lacerations that would occur if any of these scored so much as a glancing slice.

It was Ranek who saved the day on that one, the squib casting one of the few true spells he could, invoking a 'wall of force' to appear, making it wide enough to cover the five allies with a half-arc that gave them twenty-five feet of space to move around. Establishing the energy wall gave just enough time for Narcissa to complete a Blessing in the name of Caduceus, to create an area of salubrity and cleanliness fifty feet around her position, thus covering all her allies against the diseases, parasites and grime the enemy was spreading around with her attacks.

Lord Nott, a true and sanctified practitioner of The Old Ways, finally remembered what he had learned as a wee lad about the Bracken Covens that dwelt in forlorn, abandoned places like swamps, cemeteries, derelict villages, and even some ghost ships drifting at sea. The geriatric man pulled out a small item from his vest pocket, unshrinking it and placing it upon his head. The dark wizard had just donned an antiquated shamanic helmet crafted from the head of a goat with twisted horns, overly long ears, and two mutated eyes the pupils of which were shaped like triangles with small squiggles at each of the three points.

The stubborn cover-chief of head-butting horny ewes

Offering a prayer to the ancient deity Habberrath, god of life, bio-diversity, mutation and horrors, the old scholar of deep magicks incanted a spell so foul that his breath became noxious, puffing out in coal-black mist as drool the same color dribbled down his chin, while his fingers seemed to become crooked and discolored, as if they were rotting with high-speed gangrene.

"Nnniiieeeh! Eh! Eh! Eh! Suffer, witch! Suffer, Habberrath commands it! Eh! Eh! Eh!" Lord Nott exulted in the throes of a spell so vile that the very ground he stood upon began to change color and grow small parasitic mold spores and toxic fungal shoots that glowed in broad daylight. He brought his now crooked left pinkie finger to his chapped, purplish lips, offering an obscenely lascivious kiss of obedience to the sigil ring that bore the crest of his Faith. Flinging the ring-hand towards the enemy, he sent out a trio of air-warping ink-black bolts that left a blurry after-image in their wake as they moved slowly, but with the crushing certitude of impending DOOM.

Dumbstruck by the fact that some cheap wizard, a mere male!, from outside her coven could have ever managed to learn the secrets of "Rot & Decay" spell-lists, let alone have incurred enough favor from the hallowed genitor of all monstrosities in the Realms, the Bracken Witch lost that one precious second of reaction time that would have allowed her to dodge the coming spell. Getting hit by all three bolts of arcane might at the same time, the stilt-walking witch was propelled backwards, pole-legs over head around-and-around, until she smacked resoundingly in the side of a solidly built stonework artisan's house. The female entity made so much noise on impact that all five humans winced in reflex sympathy at the though of the broken bones and numberless bruises that would result from -hugging- the stone wall like that.

The cruel dark spell sent by Lord Nott was an Unholy Desecration from the highly specialized spell-lists "Rot & Decay", a sub-division of both biomancy and necromancy. He had deployed a 'soul erosion' curse that began to have effect immediately on contact. It inflicted the target with an intense feel of gloom & doom, making them feel as if nothing would ever go right again in their life to such degree that the victim became apathetic to their own life or health. Then the curse eroded the person's survival instincts down to almost nothing, making them perceive only enemies and no friends or reprieves anywhere so that suicide seemed the cleaner option. Finally, it attacked the very cognitive processes of the victim, pushing them to simply drop to the ground in panic, rolled in a fetal ball, falling comatose in hope of never feeling such misery again.

Despite being well and truly stunned by the sudden flight and hard arrival into the neighbor's still solid masonry building, the Bracken Witch somehow had enough energy left to roll herself into a ball of quivering misery and fears. Then, after cackling a few things under her breath, the enemy being again 'fumated' away, but this time went well passed human eyesight. The four allies tried to see where she might have gone, but even Amelia's monocle couldn't find the rotting swamp witch on crutches.

Lord Nott seemed to be returning to his normal well and cleanly dressed standards, and his usual vitriolic attitude was coming back too. "Well, Lucius! I'll say, old chap! When you and the Bones lass told me we'd be having a bit of sporting fun this morn, I never would have thought to see two extinct lifeforms in one outing. Splendid, man! Just splendid, I tell you! The Bracken Covens were thought to have all been wiped out by the Catholic witch hunters, aided by the Grimm Hunters and the Slayers' Guild. They were tooting their own horns, of course. That must be it... They missed a few, and now we have proof!"

Pulling out a worn handkerchief, the old scholar wiped the grimy, brackish sweat from his face and head, the cloth coming away blackened as if stained by ink, except that thin lines of gray ethereal mist were wafting up from the soiled linen. Not paying any mind to the kerchief that he stuffed back inside his winter jacket with the shrunken goat helmet, the elderly mage crowed gleefully "Ah, what a glorious day for science and magick, I tell you! Just wait until Theodore hears he missed it! I told him he needed to leave that workshop, if he wanted to experience real living magic! But did he listen? No, of course not! Children! They always know better, even when they are patently wrong!"

Now in a good and proper strop about his grand-son's lack of interest for the more esoteric forms of arcane or ancient dweomers and creatures, old Cantankerous took to bending poor Ranek's ear all the way around the village, as the five patrolled to see if they could find the witch again. After two more hours, they called it quits to get back to their people in time for a late luncheon, as well as making a report to their erstwhile Boss-man, the Lord Peverell, who was waiting for them.

Winter 1992 – Passage to Ruthgal Village

(Adrian Von Ziegler – Reign of the Dark)

Monday, November 16th of 1992  
Kiev  
The Dnieper River, Ukraine

It was a good thing that poison drakes liked their food seasoned with venom and poisons, as it made their noses slightly less impacted by the environment inflicted upon the pair. The occult side of Kiev was genuinely a place of damnation for everybody inside its municipal limits, even the self-styled ruling species. The proof being that any white-skinned Ukrainian human wizard born in town that got rich enough to afford it moved out to find a living elsewhere. Preferably well away from the blasted Dnieper watershed and its weird beasts.

Right now, Anaresh could sympathize with the soft-skinned fools, even if she didn't want to.

After getting stung by a dozen stirges, two radioactive spiders and one transphasic worm, she really had her fill of this dump. Especially since it all happened in the first hour they were here, and kept coming back the same every hour afterwards. Now, after four days of crawling around this messy, stinky, slimy trash heap of society's most useless magically endowed beings, Anaresh was ready to call it quits and try the Miskatonic citadel instead, regardless of it having a worse reputation.

Ilresh swore crassly under his breath as he tried with partial success to avoid stepping into a puddle of offal that had been dumped in the street from one of the windows above. In this poor sector of Kiev, people didn't always have indoor plumbing, nor the skills to cast vanishing charms, so they did as their ancestors. They flung the contents of their chamber pots and trash bins out into the streets from their balconies or dormer windows, without bothering to look down first to avoid pedestrians. "Death from Above" it had been called in the Middle Ages, because you could catch cholera, dysentery, influenza, gastrointestinal bugs, and many more fatal diseases on contact with the organic wastes. Nine centuries of history and evolution seemed to have marched passed the entire town, leaving the residents in a quagmire they had no hopes of changing, and the young dragon was entirely tired of it all.

Looking sideways at his mother, Ilresh asked softly "Where are we going now?"

The desperate mother replied "I managed to scrounge enough platinum coins to pay for two pedestrian gateway passes to the Styx River. We're going to Ruthgal Village, a few hours' flight away from the portal. When we get there, we'll be able to scrounge around the foolish tourists and dumber residents to get camping tools and spell components for the longer voyage." Looking around to make certain they were not followed or being spied on, she continued "I have my fill of Earth in general, and humanity in particular. White humans, to be honest, make me sicker than a barrel full of whiskey mixed with Javel bleach and salt."

Shaking his head in amusement, the younger wyrm snarked "I don't want to know about that!'

Smiling for the first time in weeks, Anaresh quipped in good humor "I'll tell you the story when you're older. Let's just say your father figures preeminently in the action." She finished with a much sober "We need a new home, preferably one where humans are the minority species and hold no political or religious power. Otherwise, we'll just be changing places but keeping the same problems and threats. The Stygian dimension should give us that."

Nodding in resignation, the child whispered "Agreed. I just hope it isn't winter when we cross into the demi-plane. I've had enough of being cold even inside the buildings where we sleep."

{ HP } --- { Across the Veils } --- { HP }

The two disguised poison drakes arrived at the gateway, a completely public building that everybody in the magical districts knew about. Pretty much like a train or bus station, there were arches that were the permanent gateways and people lined in queues in front of each portico. The clients dropped money on a small podium for the attendant to count before being touched with a wood rod that put a temporary 'visa' spell on them to allow passage through the wardings that kept the gates safe, even when open.

The mother and child duo got in line indicated by the clerk that was moving around the crowd to insure the people got to the proper gate for the destination they wanted. He also confirmed their price, so they didn't wait in line only to get turned away for lack of money when they reached the podium. The two dragons were immensely relieved when they finally passed the shimmering energy vortex of the gateway, crossing the dimensional curtain into the Styx River.

Quickly they realized that the climate was just as wintry here as it was on Earth, if not worse given that some of the 'ordinary' wind gusts felt more like tropical storm strength than anything else. Once clear of the building where the arrival gate and payment clerk were situated, the two dragons shifted back to their natural shapes and took off into the freezing winds. It only took three hours of flight to reach Ruthgal village, but the pair had to stop five times to reaffirm their storm shields and add body heat booster charms so they could endure the trip.

{ HP } --- { Ruthgal fishing hamlet } --- { HP }

Ruthgal was a pit.

A simple, rather Renaissance looking fishing community of barely a thousand souls, with about a hundred tourists spread between hotels, spare rooms to let, and a few farmstead barns. The poorest, or sickest, huddled miserably in semi-abandoned houses or barns, and a few shoddy boats moored just a bit outside the village wharf to avoid docking fees.

Even by low the evening lights, the village looked mediocre and uninviting, and that was before taking account of the snow and ice, plus the fetid smells of open-air sewers and rotting fish guts that permeated the docks and adjacent public marketplace. It was better than magical Kiev, yes, but only because there was less of it, not because the quality had improved. There were nomadic Bedouin camps in the Iraq desert that were cleaner and more inviting, even when they had to bring the camels inside the tents for a few days to survive a bad sandstorm.

Anaresh got pulled from her depressive thoughts when Ilresh suddenly dropped out of the air, abandoning flight for a stumbling, haphazard four-legged landing just outside the village. The child aimed for an abandoned barn that was listing worryingly towards one side, but still held firm against the winds and blowing snow. Ilresh collapsed unconscious about a hundred feet before the partially opened doors of the derelict barn. His mother landed next to him, snorting in disgust at the reek of disease emanating from the small puddle of vomit that had leaked out of his mouth when he fell to the snow-covered ground.

Honestly, the female dragon wasn't surprised. After passing four days in magical Kiev, eating things without pronounceable names and sleeping in what amounted to covered trash bins more than real buildings, one of them getting sick was to be expected. And since the male dragon had a habit of eating pretty much anything to sustain his growth, it was reasonable that it had been him that got the illness. Anaresh sighed as she cast several floating disks to lift the unconscious child and move him without occupying her hands, in case enemies appeared.

Not having any choice since the boy could not change shapes while sleeping through the disease, the forlorn mother started casting multiple mending and woodworks dweomers at the falling barn to set it right and straight, making it resistant to snow, sleet, water and strong wind gusts. She repaired the doors and placed a pair of seals on them since there were no actual locks. The inside was truly primitive, just barren dirt and wooden posts to hold the roof aloft. Sighing again, she used woodworks spells to fell a few trees and craft a crude log flooring that she quickly set on stilts, some four feet above the bare ground. Then she used a quick spell to dig a round pit to build a bonfire from the shredded lesser branches she had ripped off the trunks for her build. After a half hour of intense spell-casting and construction, the barn could sustain life for a few weeks, as long as fresh firewood and food were brought in.

Anaresh placed her sleeping child on the raised platform that occupied the entire width and three quarters of the length of the floor. With a good space between the wood deck and the ground, the heat from the fire would be able to circulate underneath to warm it from below, thus helping to compensate for the retched chill and squalls of snow that periodically blew outside the flimsy shelter's thin plank walls. Over the rest of the evening, Anaresh had to go out to fell more trees to create stout pillars to set at an angle to reinforce the long-side walls. Once the pillars were dug-in and magically glued to the barn to strengthen the structure, she used a low-power charm to slice several trunks in half along the length then placed these half-rounds on top of the new support struts to create a leaning shelter for the firewood and tools she would accumulate on her sorties.

It took three hours to reinforce both sides of the barn, and another hour to fell enough trees to have four day's worth of stored fuel. During her last pass over the forest canopy to select which trees to chop, Anaresh managed to snag a pair of animals for food; a boar and a deer. She ate both as she had been fighting the damnable cold, wind and snow, all the while casting more than she normally did outside of building a permanent nesting area. Thankfully, now sated and her firewood reserves filled, she was able to retreat inside the barn to benefit from the warmth of the large bonfire besides her sleeping, ailing child.

Winter 1992 – First contact home

(Adrian Von Ziegler – Under one Banner)

Wednesday, November 18th of 1992  
Mistgate Glen  
Point of Ayre, Isle of Man, The Britannic Realms

Harry Potter walked around the small, antiquated drydock with his winter coat opened, hat and gloves stuffed in his pockets since the glen's internal ward bubble had finally reached its optimal, spring-like weather climate. The artificially refreshed air pocket would recycle some of its atmosphere and water while siphoning a small amount of materials from the external environment as necessary to upkeep the fragile equilibrium between elements, plants, animals, peoples and crafting.

The mix of humans and house-elves were in the plot of land just west of the gate-hub, using the obsolete buildings with the set of fixed traverse beams and hoists that spanned the space between them to build a respectable boat. The design envisioned was based on the humble wooden carrack seafaring sail-ship, a venerable single-mast model that had been used for blue water fishing since the 1300's. Being 150 feet long, 30 feet wide and a main body of 10 feet height with 7 feet in the cabin and wheelhouse, the boat was a rather humble specimen.

The hull was a single fully enclosed deck all the full length, plus a rear cabin with a flat roof where the piloting cubicle was located, and a forward platform hanging over the waves to permit spear-fishing when the weather was decent enough. As a purely civilian design, the carrack had no fortified elements or weaponry built-on. This revised version of the obsolete system would be equipped with both a sail-mast and steam engine, fueled by ethanol to run the single screw, two anchoring capstans, and four small electrical alternators for the radio, TV and computer. The kitchen, bathroom and bunk room would be equipped with iron stoves that also used ethanol, taken from the same cistern as the main boiler. Small magical crystals would give light and climate in case of emergencies, and a miniature stone rod was put in place as free-floating manatite to lay a ward matrix over the vehicle. This would also provide all the energy needed for a fire-gate, a water-gate, a mirror-gate, and a scrying telescope linked to a glass panel next to the piloting console to help steer the ship in fog or storms.

Luckily, the small commune of mismatched people had plenty of artisans that knew how to work with vegetal matter, and potioneers to brew the glues, varnishes and oils to waterproof and enchant the hull's many parts and machines. The elves took care of the mainsail and small foresails, as well as most of the ropes needed to gird the cloth to the ship's rigging. Crafting and placing the two steel anchors with their long chains was relatively easy, as the hydraulic capstans took all the real engineering effort in that task. The large boiler was a simpler, more efficient idea than the old way of making a giant kettle. They had placed a horizontal flame-box under two coils composed of four metal tubes filled with pressurized fresh water. Each coil assembly generated steam for a specific machine; the four-piston marine engine or the electrical grid. The clean steam exhausted from the two sectors after working would be recovered in a cooling vat to serve as potable water for drinking, cooking and washing.

All in all, the small wooden boat was shaping up to a reliable working device, and it would just be a question of working aboard enough to get the crew experienced properly. Training generic crewmen for handling cargo, cleaning and galley duties would be easy, fishing with crossbows or nets somewhat easy if long, but the engineers and pilots would take effort and patience. And a few house-elves aboard at all times, just in case things went bad without warning.

{ HP } --- { Meeting in a small workroom } --- { HP }

Harry was whispering to Rehz in Parseltongue as they entered the ground level of the bigger building, right next to the finished boat. A few elves were cleaning the main workshop since the construction activity was finished, and no more boat-building would happen for a while.

Nodding at the short green beings as he passed by them towards the stairs, the human child again realized just how much they had contributed to the survival, productivity and ease of their small, limited community. Having never been specist or bigoted in his life, Harry again admitted to himself how hard and painful the trip through the Styx River and reactivating the Mistgate Glen would have been if the humans had been all on their own. In truth, he doubted they could have kept half the people alive through the Styx if they had not benefited from the elves' help, which spoke a lot about the humans, magical and mundane, and their limited survival & practical skills.

The twelve year old boy arrived at the first floor to the welcoming aroma of steeping tea and warm oatmeal-berry muffins with vanilla icing. Quickly taking cups and plates, the boy and dragonnet took their mid-morning snack then sat at the drafting table with the mission team that had been assembled for the first outside contact job.

Since the entire group had seen the Queen's public address on TV a week ago, the hamlet had been abuzz with renewed hopes that they could reach outside the containment fields to contact their homes and families, for those that had any left. This had led to the quick design of a very simplified seafaring hull, just big enough and reliable enough to handle the Irish Sea's winter storms as the boat loitered in place while people went back-&-forth via fire-gate or teleportation spells. Thanks to the knowledge and skills of their less magical members, the group had been able to scratch-out a tolerable design and build it inside of eight days flat. Thank magick for crafting spells and alchemy, and for house-elves who did a lot of the heavy lifting, as well as some cloth-work for the sails, bedding and bathroom linens.

The week of delay had also been enough for Neville and Draco to set up their large alembics to distillate pure ethanol to power the ship's mundane engine and electrical systems. Each boy had taken a property for his own, with an eye on the future career they had planned, so they each already had the buildings, materials and raw resources necessary for a smooth start-up. Seeing the four dozen wooden barrels of 155 gallons, filled with brand new ethanol made by a pair of boys with only a year of Hogwarts in them, was a big morale booster for the village residents.

Looking around the room, Harry saw that Professor Snape sat with a single cane leaning on the table near his right hand. He had managed to heal his brain and nerves enough that he no longer felt vertigo or dizziness every other day, or when the weather turned too rapidly. Dressed in his usual, austere, black Welsh robes, the master potioneer was enjoying his Low Tea in placid conversation with Garrick Ollivander, the two men so deep in their subject matter that Harry had sat and eaten his first muffin before he was noticed.

"Ah! My Lord Peverell!" exclaimed the ecstatic wand-crafter, "We were just speaking of the surprisingly high erudition and skills of the young in this glen. The abilities demonstrated by your cohorts far surpass what was taught at Hogwarts, even in this last year."

Making a small, vindictive smile, Severus Snape added "Indeed. Dumbledore would have been most put out that children were given such polyvalent, and powerful, education while he yet ruled the Welsh Wiccan sect. It was his worse dream, you see, to not be seen by humanity as the next great Merlyn of the Isles. And with the way some of your generation's members are working already, I dare say his nightmare would be true before your septennat at Hogwarts would have ended formally."

Snorting in unladylike fashion, Amelia Bones quipped "Gaia forbid that anything present poor old Albus in a bad light. Certainly he never did anything to deserve such. Especially that bloody dream of being a god to a chattel of decerebrated flesh dolls."

Nodding at the ex-auror chief as she refreshed her tea cup, Ollivander sneered nastily "I doubt the old bastard's true secrets were ever found. And I doubt that not being the greatest wizard alive was really his nightmare. Maybe it was his short-term goal, or a passing political ambition, but I do not think it was so high in his mind as to claim it was such a commanding fear to him."

Professor Snape shrugged, replying offhandedly "He was quite the vainglorious popinjay, on the Lockhart scale even, if you could believe that another of the sort could exist. Then again, that fool braggart did study at Hogwarts in my younger years there. Maybe that is what he learned from Dumbledore? The old fraud had to be a genuine master at something, did he not?"

Almost choking on her tea, Amelia shook her head and wagged a finger at the two men, warning them to not make her spasm on her precious liquid warmth. "Enough! I doubt that our much vaunted Lords and Ladies want to sit idly as we rehash old school-era tales."

Neville gestured vaguely with his muffin-holding hand as he sipped tea, then saying most magnanimously "Please, do go on. Us younglings do need to be educated about these things."

"No, please, change the subject!" Begged Lucius Malfoy as he arrived from the bathroom, drying his hands with a quick spell before stowing his wand back in his cane. "We have a mission to plan before the plebes revolt in the streets. We can chat about school tales later at night, when we share brandy besides the hearth."

Unable to let such an easy one pass by unchallenged, Harry quipped with a bratty smirk "Yes, share the brandy, why don't you. Especially now that Draco has got his distillery up and running, it's not like you'll ever go dry, hemm? Child exploitation, that's what it is..."

Huffing in protest, the wizard Lord replied gamely "At the price he charges me for his brews, I could sue him for elder abuse! And even in front of an honest judge, I would win!"

Severus playfully put in "Ah, the vagaries of youth... If only Narcissa hadn't insisted on teaching him the true value of barter and commerce so young, maybe then you could still exploit him. Alas, she is Black, and so are her plans for your future fortunes."

As Lucius gifted his old friend a withering glare, Harry chimed in with fake care "Is my cousin taking good care of little Draco, then? Oh, good. I thought I'd have to get involved, and with my own childhood being what it was... Well, that couldn't have ended well." He waved a hand in good humor, adding benevolently "As long as the pair remember to send me my 3% cut on all transactions, I'm happy to let them operate as they will. That, and my weekly bottle of booze."

Lucius glared malevolently at the nominal head of his wife's House, garnering much mirth from the others present in the room to attend the mission meeting.

Amelia's right hand man, Ranek Lansard, straightened up from where he was leaning against a windowsill, looking over the new boat's main deck from where he was placed. The wooden ship did seem in good condition, and fit to handle the rough waves, but only time would tell if they had interpreted the old blueprints correctly. Finding the parchment sheets in a stasis chest in the foreman's office was a stroke of better luck than they had any right to expect, but all the changes and upgrades had been made by their own people. Those innovations were untested, even if the principles had all been proven as separate pieces before being assembled inside the hull.

"Right, Boss-Lady. What do we do now?" the ranger was not one for long theories or planning meetings, being more at ease in the wild lands or on a farm with animals than this sort of office pow-wow between bosses. "We need to kit her out and send the first team, so who'll it be?"

Garrick asked kindly "Are you quite certain that you wish to be the commander of our new boat, mister Lansard? It is a great deal of stress, being responsible for so many persons and goals."

Harry Potter added in gentle tones "It's not that we distrust you, or doubt your capacities in getting the boat out and back. You were one of our best pilots during the Styx convoy, and you had the least troubles aboard your skiff in terms of damages or crew morale issues. Still, I very easily remember how you said, in those first days here in the glen, that you would never take command of another boat in your life again. You had been worn out by the responsibility for others, and authority was not something you craved, unlike autonomy and peace."

Amelia Gazed upon the strong, reliable young man, adding kindly "You put your name forward before we could ask for volunteers, or even petition you privately as we knew your desires. Why is that? I don't doubt your motivations, but it is out of character from what you have told me."

Nodding amiably, the young human took up his empty cup to pour in some hot tea which he sipped plain, grabbing a muffin as he sat at his place by the table. "My views changed, like the set of circumstances we have to live with. When we left by the Stygian flows, it was pretty much as I had thought; rough, wild, and no civilization in reach for weeks. Then we arrived here, and it was a friggin' lot bigger, better preserved, and far, far better built than stuff 700 years obsolete should have been. Some of the buildings are less than two centuries old, in style at least."

Giving a careless shrug, the ranger explained "I had expected a truly ruined hamlet by the sea, just the bare rotting timber posts and fieldstone foundations. Not this collection of over-sized doll houses that were stored in a drafty old attic, to be brought down when the grand-daughters come to visit once a year. It's... How to say? I wanted wild lands, forests, beasts, and to be away from the big, organized concentrations of people like Diagon, Knockturn or Hedgerow. This was supposed to be wilderness and isolation, not a new Colonial Era military settlement job."

Harry sighed deeply, peering into the depths of his half-empty cup as he ordered his thoughts to answer the man's legitimate problem. "I know that you came to us via Gringotts, who said that you would not feel well if you had to live underground for more than a few days. You have good recommendations, or you wouldn't have made it passed the Black Blood-Wards, and yet, I feel that something is holding you in thrall. What is it, that truly ails you? Why are you so uneasy when other humans, or any other species at that, are too close near you?"

Pursing his lips in anger, Ranek roughly ran a hand through his long hair, before deciding that more than a few around this table would understand what he had lived. "When I was a kid, I was bit by that rabid mongrel, Fenrir Grayback. It was during a full moon, and he was transformed, so the attack on my family was planned. It was what he did, you know? He targeted wizarding homes to bite the kids to grow his ranks, especially with girls so they could be raised in the Pack and breed him an army that was brainwashed from birth. Well, I was a mud-blood, and both my parents got killed in the attack. So, the fucking bastards in the Department of Mysteries used the opportunity to try a new idea they had, about how to stop lycanthropy from spreading."

Lucius Malfoy frowned suspiciously as he contemplated the young man, but remained silent.

Professor Snape growled in anger, hissing tartly "They didn't!"

Nodding forlornly, the ranger said "Lycanthropy is a purely magical 'cursed' virus that will affect mundanes only for three months before it tears their bodies apart during change. Only a magical human can become a viable, reproductible lycan. So, the felons in the DoM tied me to the floor of a cage built with silver bars and force-fed me Squibbing Oil through a feeding tube right in the side of my throat. They killed my magic, then cast a generic 'cure disease' charm at me. It worked as they thought; the malady was gone, but so were any magical abilities I ever had. After that, they dumped me in St-Mungo's from where I went to a small orphanage that took in others in my sort of situation, born magical but lost it from illness or injury."

Ollivander whispered "But you cast spells! Cantankerous was quite formal of this! And I myself saw you cast 'mending' and 'healing' charms during our Stygian ordeal."

Nodding, the despondent male confirmed "The Unspeakables had rated me a muggle when their experiment was done, so they never checked further. In truth, I was really a 'passive squib' that had so little magic inside that I couldn't even see the Leaky Cauldron or Hogwarts. But, with time and effort, by never giving up on what was stolen from me, I was eventually able to learn a few low-powered spells that I can cast proficiently. I am now rated as an 'active squib' who can fully perceive and interact with magical things or beings, and I can probably heal a bit more."

Hermione Granger slowly walked into the room from the balcony where she had been loitering, having stopped to listen discretely to the very amusing banter between people who were normally so stiff and formal. Then the conversation had turned badly, and now she was stuck walking in at the worse moment possible.

"Oh! Hello Hermione! Where did you come from?" asked Neville, surprised to see her there.

Smiling kindly at her friend, the young girl explained "I was kinda press-ganged into setting up the electricity and computer systems in the hull. Given how high the boat is when it's in the dock, they just set some gang-planks between the main deck and the balconies on the buildings on each side to make movements between workshops and boat sectors easier." The girl shrugged as she sat with her cup of tea and muffin, "I admit that becoming a professional computer technician was not high in my list of potential careers, but as a supplemental skillset, it has its uses."

Harry smirked as he playfully took a dig at his friend "That means she sees world altering power in those damned wires and keyboards, but not enough raw knowledge to b worth her efforts."

Several guffaws of mirth sounded around the room as the Lady Dagworth-Granger flipped off the presumptuous boy. Why was he her best friend, again?

Turning towards Ranek Lansard, Hermione asked as gently as she could; "Excuse me for picking at an old wound... But you said the orphanage that raised you took in specifically children that were born magically active, but then lost their magic along the way." Looking uncomfortable, the young girl wondered "Could there really have been that many injured or sick children who lost their magic that they needed to build an institution just for these cases? How is it we never heard of this in school?"

Ranek sighed tiredly as he drained his cup to refill it with more liquid courage. "Yeah, there's that many kids in that situation in England, Scotland and Ireland. For other countries, I don't rightly know. Most of the kids were like me: mud-bloods from nameless wizarding houses. Sometimes, we got in a bastard whose mum was raped by a wizard, so then the DOM had the right to take the kid to run 'experiments' to see if muggleness or squibness were catching, like dragon pox or stuff. In the end, these kids were always fed squibbing oil to make certain they couldn't legally claim any part of the rapist's House or monies, or any standing inside magical Britain. The only way you could have origins outside the stupid 'purebloods' and stay magical, or even live, was to be registered in Hogwarts' Book of Souls or have protection from a guild, church or noble House that claimed you as a servant. And we can't forget how many kids were kicked out of the High Houses every year for the dumbest reasons. Oftentimes, they lost a great deal of their innate magicks when the Family's Blood-Law was ripped out during the expulsion ritual. Then you have the bunch of twits who experiment with spells and potions without having a clue of the dangers. When it explodes in their faces and squibs them, they need a place, too."

Hermione was pale, trembling with both horror and abject disgust at the situation that was described in such a drab, monotone voice. She had her answers, and wished she hadn't asked.

Harry inquired softly "Is that what most of the people Gringotts sent me suffered from? And is that why they were so desperate to leave England, and Earth? Because the country had betrayed them so badly that any alternative at all would be better than returning there, even if the country was profoundly changed by what the queen and military have done?"

Ranek shrugged, uncomfortable at having been exposed so publicly. "Lots of the guys, yeah, that's their problem. But others were just too poor to make ends meet in a monetary system, due to having too few magical or practical skills to trade on. They're mostly an honest bunch, just not very lucky when it came to being handed Gifts, Talents, magicks or skills."

{ HP } --- { Mission preparations } --- { HP }

Harry made a pensive face for a minute before waving the event away, saying "I may have something to test out, at a later date. I wonder if you would help with that? I can already promise that it will not hurt you, at worse it just wouldn't work."

Shrugging uncomfortably, the older male gave a tentative agreement. He was justifiably weary of being experimented on, but this kid had done nothing but care for others since he met him.

"Well, then, if we could get back to the mission planning?" asked Garrick, amused at it all.

"Indeed," professor Snape added dryly, "I need to get back to Draco; if left unsupervised for too long, he could actually try to brew something truly potent, and maybe even succeed."

Snorting at the heavy sarcasm in the man's words, Lucius nonetheless nodded his support of his feelings, as did Neville and Harry who both knew their friend's proclivities quite well by now.

Amelia gestured towards Hermione, asking "Have all the electronics been installed in the hull? Will the crew be able to communicate with Britain reliably? We have scrying mirrors and fire-gates to call the glen, but calling the mundane military truly depends on those systems."

The twelve year old girl huffed a bit before draining her cup, setting it on the table for now. "Yes, the basic systems are all in place. The alternators are producing current enough for all the communications and computers. The antennae are in place and tested. We even managed to test the GPS signal's accuracy and stability to help the navigator pilot the boat safely. The only part I can't help with is the message encoding. Almost all military comms are coded, and I have no idea what codes they are using since I never worked for the government before." Gesturing vaguely with her hand, the girl amended "Well, the armed services, anyways. I worked for the crown as a seated Gamot member like many of you, but I was never old enough to have enrolled in the uniformed services. Amelia may have a better idea though, as she would have been trained for at least one or two civilian emergency situation codes."

The ex-auror nodded at that, "Yes, I have one cypher that I will help you program into the machines, but it is nearly ten years out of date."

Ranek commented "I think ya'll thinking this way too far. Just get the boat out to sea, gate over to one of the Noble Houses and use the local Floo or phone to call-in to Buckingham Palace to signify you're still alive and serving the crown. They aught to tell you what to do from there."

Several people all looked properly annoyed at their overly complex plan, especially when Severus grumped "Dunderheads..." under his breath as an aside to Garrick, who then positively cackled in gleeful humor at them all.

{ HP } --- { Whatever floats your boat } --- { HP }

With a clear goal and method in mind, the rest of the planning was quick to process; tabulating the quantities of food, potions, fuel and crewmen necessary for the boat to float safely while the Emissaries were on Albion to survey the situation was all done inside of an hour.

Thanks to the elves, the boat was supplied and rigged in two hours, and slowly pushed down into the frigid waters of the Irish Sea just past the end of lunch time. The boat would have a permanent crew of six humans and six elves, split in two shifts of twelve hours each day, to keep the machine afloat and functional. The first people to go to ground would be Hermione and old Lord Nott with their elves. Each would go tour their properties and bring back to Mistgate Glen several resources, tools and books that they had to leave behind on their precipitous escape.

Hermione had taken her elf matron Tinny on the voyage, but left her human valet Roland Holtzberg back in the glen. Likewise, Lord Cantankerous Nott had brought an elf but left his grand-son Theo in the commune. Hermione's job was to get contact with her parents to obtain fresh information as to how mundane British society was recovering from the mess. Lord Nott would be going to the magical areas for a survey of what was left, and try to get contact with the Goblins of Gringotts, to see if they could be used as intermediaries to contact the English Crown.

The first external foray should last just 24 hours in total, with the entire boat and crew coming back to harbor once the Emissaries had returned with their cargo and reports. Nothing big or dangerous for the first trip, and no contacts with the government yet. Not until they knew for real what was truly happening in the streets, homes and businesses of England. Harry in particular was weary that the televised speech may have been a setup with a fake queen to make wizards and magical entities feel safe enough to come out in the open so they could be identified and hunted for extermination, or worse, enslavement. Since that fear was legitimate and shared by almost everybody in the glen, the decision to have a very discrete, hidden first excursion was accepted by all without any dissent.

x----------x

The hybrid steam carrack slowly made it way out of the docks, the elves spelling the sails to unfurl while the pilot started the engine, making the massive propeller screw come alive, churning saltwater so harshly that it created back-splash all over the ends of the wooden piers as the small ship moved out.

It took about fifteen minutes to sail through the mile-wide zone of coastal water that fronted the glen and pass the outer layer of wards. Then the boat was in blue waters, getting hit by the full brunt of winter climate in the Irish Sea, between England and Ireland. Winds up to 30 miles per hour and an occasional, short-lived cloud of white powdery snow swept across the ship, but kept on changing direction, never coming from the same side. The sunlight was dim, even at midday, and the cold temperature made everybody happy the ship was powered by a steam boiler that made so much heat, instead of the more modern, purely electrical engines which ran cold.

The pilot kept the boat on a steady course, heading true-north for an hour passed the ward line, to reach coordinates that had been agreed by the planning team. Here, the ship would drop its two anchors and idle until the Emissaries had returned with news and materials. The moment the propeller was shut down and all steam directed to the pumps and generators, the fire-gate was spelled active and the first test contacts were made. Then the elves were given permission to teleport to their homes, to open the wards and clear the way for the humans to enter through the conventional manner.

The moment the two humans were gone, Ranek took the cellular telephone from its charging cradle to call the gate-hub back at the glen, to inform them that the mission had begun. Now, all that was left to do was wait until the two teams returned.

Winter 1992 – A persistent malignancy

(Adrian Von Ziegler – Dark Ritual)

Thursday, November 19th of 1992  
Ruthgal village  
The Styx River demi-plane

Over the last three days, Anaresh had sat vigil next to her son, adopting drachin form as it allowed her to sleep on a second smaller platform she built near the barn doors, so she didn't get crushed or spiked by the boy when he thrashed around in his unquiet sleep. On many occasions the mother had to use spells to remove vomit or excrement from the wooden deck when her son's diseased body underwent sudden spasms due to large volumes of fetid gas that exited through the mouth and lower orifices. Not knowing what else to do, she had dug a trench a hundred feet in front of the barn to dump all wastes and trash, so she could burn it all periodically.

At one point, the female dragon became extremely worried because the boy hadn't waken yet but villagers had come to see what had happened to change the old derelict barn so drastically. One whiff at the pile of smelly offal that was accumulating in an open trench some hundred feet in front of the barn doors made everybody turn back and warn their neighbors to stay away. Again, the poor, destitute mother wondered if she would have anything left in this world, when all was said and done.

One sorry, lonely, freezing night, eight days after reaching Ruthgal, a dreary squall of snow, sleet and tornado strength winds swept through the village. Everybody hunkered down as best they could, the few spell-users in the small hamlet being forced to cast supplemental wards at their buildings to stay safe and warm through the freezing blizzard. Most knew that several of the older and sicker villagers would be found frozen to death come the end of the squall.

{ HP } --- { The end of hope } --- { HP }

(Adrian Von Ziegler – Blood Night)

In the wee hours of the earliest morning of November 20th of 1992, Anaresh was sleeping fitfully in the weaker, less imposing, drachin form on her small bed-platform when a loud sound of something large, wet and leathery being rent apart filled the barn. Opening her eyes in a panic, she could only witness events helplessly as the thorax of her sleeping child finished exploding outwards in a shower of organic shrapnel that threw scales, stiff rawhide, bone shards, rancid blood and offal. The last belching blast of gas that escaped from the cadaver was so powerful that the organic debris rebounded on the inner walls of the barn, back-splashing over the dead dragon and covering everything up to the rafters in bloody, gangrenous fluids.

Poor despondent Anaresh didn't escape from the foul showering, getting herself and her meager bedding utterly soaked in pussy, gangrenous blood and gobbets of rotten flesh. She even got stabbed in the face, shoulders and arms by small shards of cracked scales and bones that flew out when the body had detonated with the last of the fetid gases releasing from the bowels. Ignoring her own superficial injuries, the mother let out a long, mournful keening whine of misery at the realization that her poor child had been dying all week, and that he never woke up to say goodbye.

The wailing mother's misery was increased when movement began near the mouth of the corpse, ajar from when the gas had been forcing its way out through every path it could find.

Insects. Maybe? Shellfish?

There were large, purplish, multi-legged insects (?) the size of ocean lobsters or jumbo shrimp crawling out of her dead boy's mouth, digging through the rotten gums, cracked teeth and flaccid lips as if his passing meant nothing to anybody!

(Adrian Von Ziegler – Powerless)

In a blind rage deep enough to no longer think straight, Anaresh walked around the firepit, towards the open jaws of her dead boy, when bigger, more violent, movements occurred in the belly area, which could be heard and seen through the many rents in the flanks of the cooling carcass. Something big was moving inside of the thorax, trying to get free of the impromptu cage created by the ribs and flaccid leathery hide of the dead dragon. Another movement from inside the torso was so violent that it made the cadaver's neck and tail flop around, accidentally flinging outwards the insects/shellfish that had been crawling around the gums and teeth. Several smacked Anaresh in the head or chest, making the human-sized poison drake windmill her arms in attempt to stay upright.

Then came the pain.

Directly upon contact with something fleshy and warm, the critters unfurled four small arms that were hidden at their front, right under their beady compound eyes and buccal apparatus. Each rigid, jointed arm ended with a thin sharp pincer that resembled a pair of long-nose pliers, and cut like diamond-coated titanium-alloy bolt cutters. Within seconds, Anaresh sported more than four dozen deep, bleeding cuts all over her legs, torso and arms, and had escaped worse injuries only because she had been able to instinctively cast a 'force wave' spell centered upon her core to repel the swarming giant insects. The monsters were so unnatural and resilient that when they were repelled by her dweomer, they punched holes through the wood plank walls of the barn like bullets instead of going 'splat' like normal critters would. In fact, the beasties could be heard chittering in the snow, just outside the barn, where they were scuttling around, trying to find a way back into the warmth where there was food to be had.

(Adrian Von Ziegler – Across Acheron)

Now beginning to understand the size and danger of the threat she faced from these shelled horrors, the grieving mother retreated atop her small sleeping deck and moved her humanoid clawed hands in a pattern that caused a mist of heavy oil droplets to coalesce in the air, all around the cadaver of her son. Soon, the barn stank pungently of cheap tallow oil, and the desolate woman used a 'force bolt' to shove the tall wooden doors open to jump out of the doomed building. She barely managed to clear the first ten feet of distance that a blast of fire and scalding air followed her into the frigid night as her oil touched the bonfire and ignited, just as she had planned.

She hadn't planned for the following fuel – air explosion that blew out the barn's roof like tree leaves in an Autumn storm, nor the hail of several dozen glowing purple lobsters that fell back down to the snowy ground, apparently none the worse for their 'jetted' aerial trip. In fact, they seemed to have been vivified by all the extra warmth they had received as those that got exploded looked more lively and chittery than those outside since a few minutes ago.

What kinds of nameless monsters were they? What had Habberath spawned, this time?

{ HP } --- { A monster is born } --- { HP }

(Adrian Von Ziegler – Ad Mortem)

As she stood in the raging snowstorm, Anaresh could only cry and wail as events unraveled around her. The fumes from the fire stank of the many poisons her poor boy had naturally secreted, plus the foul, diseased corruption of whatever had eaten away at his guts for days on end. Against the background of the vivid red pyre that had been the edifice she had lived in for the last week, several purplish insects could be seen crawling around the four feet tall snow drifts, aimlessly scurrying around, probably looking for food or shelter.

Suddenly, a horrendous screech fractured the atmosphere and the minds of those that heard it, an unnatural cacophonic accompaniment to the rending sounds that shook the blazing building as the dead corpse of the poison drake exploded outwards in great jagged pieces of decaying flesh. After boiling for nearly fifteen minutes plus an explosion, the fluids that were still under pressure inside the veins and remaining organs had reached their final limits. The carcass detonated like a pressure-cooker bomb, spreading a shock wave of compressed, scalding toxic air far worse than the incandescent debris that gave off a macabre fireworks display as they moved.

(Adrian Von Ziegler – Twisted)

In the very middle of the conflagration, a vaguely outlined misshapen thing, the size of a draft horse with a rider on its back, wreathed in oily green flames and brackish purple vapors, could be detected through the red haze of the ravenous flames as they devoured the wooden structure and the two leaning sheds full of chopped firewood. As it turned sideways to orient towards the rear of the barn and the closest doors, Anaresh thought she could see multiple jointed limbs under the mutated creature's body, but no head or tail. Of the 'rider' shape, she could discern nothing save that it looked bigger than even a very muscular specimen of the Uruk Hai orc race.

In a violent movement, the indescribable entity crashed through the barn's rear doors, breaking them asunder in an explosion of wood shards and old iron nails as it bulldozed its way clear of the fiery ruin. As soon as the large creature was clear of the brazier, all the purplish insects that had come out of the dead dragon raised thin antennae that were jointed just above their eye clusters, feeling the ambient air for -something- then all ran towards the far side of the barn, out of Anaresh' sight.

The smaller critters seemed to be following the bigger monster away from Ruthgal.

Despite the inferno consuming the barn, nobody from the rest of the village came to see what was happening, and nobody offered any help. The poor desolate mother keened her loss in the empty, frigid night air until the bleak dawn rose on the horizon, when she assumed her dragon shape and flew off, aiming randomly without any hint of goals or decisions. It would take a week before any villagers bothered to come look at the remains of the calcinated barn, and by then it would be far too late to save anybody that was still alive in this gods-forsaken cesspit.

Winter 1992 – What is left of our home

(Adrian Von Ziegler – Night Mists)

Thursday, November 19th of 1992  
Mistgate Glen  
Point of Ayre, Isle of Man, The Britannic Realms

The mood in the gate-hub had been somewhat dark all of the previous day, as the two expedition teams had been incommunicado to maximize their chances of success, in case there were still religious or anti-magic fanatics hiding in the British military or police forces. It was better to move silently and unseen as much as possible, to avoid hostile attention turning towards their small survival group. In a very honest evaluation of their capacities, nobody had even thought to suggest that they had enough magick and artifacts inside the Mistgate Glen to resist a frontal assault by the British Navy and Infantry, not when missiles with biological or incendiary charges were practically guaranteed as the first pass of the attack.

No, despite all the unease and bad blood that the members of the community were experiencing, it was better than the grave risks the Emissaries would undergo if they were discovered. It had even been decided to not contact Gringotts on this first trip, seeking instead to obtain a genuine, unvarnished portrait of what was happening in England and the Realms before trying to call anybody outside of their hamlet or boat. Given the rise of computers and satellites, Hermione had even impressed upon the hamlet's peoples the importance of not using the cellular phones unless they had an absolute need, such as confirming the departure or arrival or the teams. To avoid the ship and Glen being discovered, neither Emissary would try to phone from their homes (or other places) directly to their comms monitoring station in the gate-hub.

The Wednesday afternoon and night had been awfully stressful for everybody that stayed back in the glen, especially since they knew that if everything went well, they would have no contacts before noon today. For once, the bloody weather was cooperating with them, the winds having soften to less than ten miles per hour and the waves on the Irish Sea were barely two feet tall. It was almost paradisiac climate for a northern winter on the open waters.

Then, at 13h00pm, the cellular phone placed on the workbench next to the computer terminal began to ring, the number indicated as "private" because Hermione had managed to block out the caller-ID systems on both ends. Before any human picked up the handset, an elf that was keeping watch besides the sentry closed her eyes to sense her kindred aboard the ship, to get a feel of the situation. Opening her eyes with a wide excited smile, the shy being nodded for the human to answer the call. The female squib signaled the elf to get the leaders of the glen from the foreman's office while she took the line.

Barely five minutes later and everybody was sighing in relief. Both Hermione and Cantankerous had managed to infiltrate their respective domains and test the wards to insure they were still hidden from enemy senses. Both estates were pristine, just as they had been when going into stasis, except for the extra snow and winds that all the planet was suffering from. Thanks to their elves and shrinking charms, both humans had been able to pack supplemental resources, tools, foods and books to bolster the group's limited equipment. The glen was a goldmine of many things, but unfortunately most of it was obsolete by several centuries even if it still worked well.

{ HP } --- { Welcome back, good friends } --- { HP }

The steam carrack managed a good time, returning before 15h00pm, and docking itself at the end of the wooden piers of the drydock where it had been built. The two anchors were dropped and heavy hemp ropes thrown to the crew on shore to moor the boat to the stone pilings so she didn't go adrift if a strong wave hit the area. Once secured, the passengers and crewmen began to file down the wooden cargo ramp placed in the long-side.

Cantankerous was first to disembark from the boat with his elf. Not having any living family except Theodore, and no true points of contact amongst muggles, he barely picked up a few newspapers and magazines when he passed through London on his way to his estate. But, he did take a detour through a few small bookshops, drugstores and grocery stores in Manchester on his way back to the boat, thus he recovered a good load of canned or brined foodstuffs that had been forgotten in the derelict stores when the civil war was at its worse. Picking the remaining edibles and medications off the shelves had been a cinch for the small elf, and the elderly man had showed a deft hand with the 'looting charm', courtesy of some adventuring when he was just out of school.

Hermione came down the gangplank with a stiff, formal face, showing clearly that something had gone wrong on her trip, but obviously not violence as she had no injuries and her elf was not in a panic as she would be if her mistress was hurt. Her family, then. She must have made contact with her surviving relatives and gotten a bad result, as she had expected. In a gesture that was unlike her normal self, the twelve year old girl let the female elf take out and enlarge all that they had brought back from the Dagworth-Granger estate and some foraging in a few towns of southern England. With a discrete gesture, she got the group leaders to walk with her back to the gate-hub's main office to have a private conversation.

x----------x

Once the Peverell Alliance leaders were ensconced in the gate-hub office conference room, the girl took off her winter coat to reveal a small letter bag hanging from her shoulder by a thin leather strap. The bag was made of reinforced polyesters and bore the Crest of Britannia.

Messages from the Queen.

That would explain why Hermione wore her Wizengamot session face all the way back.

Taking a small steel key from her skirt pocket, the girl unlocked the bag then pulled out several envelopes, addressed to each seated Lady or Lord of the Wizengamot when it still existed. That meant she had her own, although it was already opened and creased from the spastic grip of the worried reader.

Harry gazed at the wax seal on that closed the flap of the vellum envelope, feeling the powerful enchantments that tied the missive to the National Sovereignty Wards of England, Scotland, Ireland and the Realms Britannic. A binding decree, then, from the hand of Dame Windsor. The boy was not surprised or offended when he felt a small pulse of magic leave the envelope to fly straight towards Buckingham Palace, to warn the queen's archmage that the letter had arrived.

Seeing no logical reason to delay further, the child-Lord offered a sanctified Blood-tithe to the seal, obtaining lawful access to the contents without triggering the nasty defensive curses set into the materials and texts to protect the 'Secrets of the Realms'.

The letter was comprised of three completely separate sheets with different texts.

The first sheet, recto only, was a template greetings & good wishes for his health and the prosperity of his House and Alliance. Just the usual royal blabber when establishing contact with anybody who was under the crown's jurisdiction, and proven loyal enough to warrant polite treatment because the relationship would be maintained for a long time.

The second sheet, recto/verso, was a also a rather banal template that ordered Harry Potter/Evans/Black/Peverell to fulfill his duties to the crown by signifying his place of residence and methods of communication to contact him regularly so that he may continue his service as a seated Lord Peer of Her Royal Majesty. The 'order' was on the recto, and the coordinates of the Military Intelligence section and Queen's Archmage were on the back side, so he could send them the required informations.

The third sheet was laden with ancient magicks that could only come from Ley Lines that had been untapped for centuries. A Throne Summons, to appear before Her Royal Majesty in the best delays practical under the current civil and international unrest that shook the planet. Harry and his Alliance leaders were to be accounting of themselves before Dame Windsor, in a place and time that were yet to be determined, so as to plan their further services as Ennobled Peers who sat in governance and guardianship of the Britannic Realms, colonies and Commonwealth.

Looking around the long room, Harry dropped the missive on the wooden tabletop, declaring in a resigned voice "It's not like any of us seated here didn't know this was coming." Turning towards Hermione, he asked "You had Cantankerous' letter? Were they not left at your residences?"

Shaking her head negatively, Hermione replied in a stressed voice, "No. They were watching my parents and relatives, and probably wiretapped their phones and faxes too. I had barely been in my parents' house for a half-hour to see for myself if they were healthy or needed evacuation when the doorbell rang, and I just knew in my gut that reality had caught up to us at last."

Taking a steadying breath, the girl explained "It was the queen's archmage himself who paid us a visit at the Granger Mansion. He didn't bother with manners or decorum, just put the batch of letters directly in my hands with a terse 'By your queen's command' and then walked back out to teleport right off the front porch. I opened my letter right there, and you have all the same thing."

Lucius Malfoy exchanged a look with Amelia Bones who nodded back in resignation, letting him give the only answer they all knew would be given. "Well then, let us see if this cellular telephone device can actually push its signal through the glen wards strongly enough to reach all the way to London. The decree requires a written and manually signed Lord's Writ to file our informations properly with the crown, but they did not say where to send it, or by which date. We can ask these questions in lieu of testing the systems, and also get some help to finish the configurations since we have no professionals on our side of the divide."

Hermione shrugged off the comment, knowing the snobby male hadn't meant any insult, even if his tone of voice and wording could sometimes make you think otherwise. She strongly suspected that Severus Snape had learned a good deal of his mannerisms and sarcasm in school when he was friends with Lucius and his group of Pureblood elitists. They shared far too many traits for it to be accidental, especially since Snape was born a half-blood but raised muggle.

Harry clapped his hands as he stood from the table, "Alright then, let's get on the horn and talk to these folks. They may be military, but I'll wager that army bureaucrats aren't any faster than civilian ones, no matter how much fighting training they get. There just isn't anything about paperwork that screams 'fight or flight' enough to make them work faster."

The Peverell Alliance leadership group laughed in relief as they filed out of the conference room to reach the sentry post where the only functioning cellular phone in the building was placed, and the person who monitored sea traffic as well. It took less than a minute to get a soldier on line to start exchanging basic facts and necessities, including deadline and location.

The MI-7 agent on the line was quite insistent that they be made aware that all their accounts and vaults in Gringotts were safe and sound, regardless of the civil war that had occurred in the streets of the surrounding magical and mundane districts in the past few weeks. While a good news, it wasn't seen as very useful for now, except to confirm that the goblins had survived without credible damages or realistic threat to their survival as a species or nation.

With a few more details and pleasantries, the line was closed and the leaders each went to their own abodes to start penning the Lord's Writ the crown had commanded from them. They had until the Friday of next week to send everything for the files to be updated before the end of November, as they would be getting convocation for December session at Westminster. The old Wizengamot was formally defunct and rescinded, so the House of Lords would stand as replacement. This fulfilled the queen's desire to see the two realities of mundanes and magicals become fully merged within her reign, and starting at the top would make the integration of the lower rungs of society much easier in the long run.

Winter 1992 – US Presidential election results

(Francis Scott Key 1814 – The Star Spangled Banner)

Friday, November 20th of 1992  
The Capitol  
Washington DC, Virginia, USA

With the recusal of George H. W. Bush, the only credible candidates left were the much contested democrat William (Bill) Clinton, and the equally polarizing libertarian Henry Ross Perot. There were a few fringe candidacies that kept on going to the end, as always, but non of them would reach 0,025% of the national vote tally.

It was passed 23h00pm on Washington DC's clock that the television network channel CNN put forth its final prediction for who would win the 1992 US Presidential Elections.

In a stunning reversal of all expectations, and with nearly 70% of all polling stations accounted, it looked as if the under-dog Ross Perot would be carrying the election this cycle. Nobody had seen this coming, and none of the pundits, experts or newsmen had any ideas of what came next.

In fact, the on-the-fly interview with the candidate at his campaign HQ in Dallas (Texas) showed clearly that the businessman was visibly stunned by the turn of events, as were his family and staffers. It would take well into the evening of Saturday to finish counting the popular vote and then parse how many Electoral College votes each candidate had garnered, but since Texas, Florida, California and Louisiana had all gone to Perot, plus several heavily populated northern states, the conclusion seemed clear.

So, on the evening of Saturday, November 21st of 1992, the Federal Electoral Commission made the declaration of the official tallies, indicating a clear 128 electoral votes majority in favor of Ross Perot, who had carried upwards of 66% of the popular suffrage across the country.

The actual Electoral College caucus would happen in December, and the confirmation just before the Yule / Christmas season holidays, with the Inauguration in January 1993, as was custom.

{ HP } --- { Structural uncertainties } --- { HP }

While a large portion of the US population was surprised at the outcome of the vote, they were also mostly happy and relieved that their country had managed to keep the elections on track, despite the nuclear attacks they had suffered.

Pretty much everybody thought the government would set back the elections to the back-end of 1993 to let the people, society and environment recover from losing seven cities all along the southern border; that would have been the logical thing to do. Instead, the outgoing president had decided that his country had suffered so much that they needed to have a clean start with a new leader in order to pass through this crisis. So, the national guard and regular military had been deployed on the US territory for the first time since the 1968 civil rights conflicts to help set up the voting stations and protect the pollsters from external threats or bribery attempts.

Not everybody was happy with this decision. In fact, many thought that the armed services would be better used in deployment along the perimeters of the seven atomic strikes, to help the wounded survivors and displaced refugees. There already were troops affected to these jobs, but the government could have affected 100% of personnel and set the voting to another year, or even skip the cycle altogether, until the country had recovered enough.

But, in what little wisdom he had left, George H. W. Bush had decided that a clear and clean psychological break between himself and the rest of the country was necessary for the people


End file.
